In the last post of my review of “Did Jesus Exist?”, we saw Ehrman tried to claim that the church fathers were lying when they claimed that they knew of elements of the mysteries of the dying-and-rising gods. So, for example, when Justin the Martyr said, “The devils, accordingly, when they heard these prophetic words, said that Bacchus was the son of Jupiter, and gave out that he was the discoverer of the vine, and they number wine [or, the ass] among his mysteries; and they taught that, having been torn in pieces, he ascended into heaven,” this excuse for why pagan resurrection predated the resurrection of Jesus was completely unnecessary. Of course, one is apt to ask how we could possibly know about pagan resurrection if people from their own time didn’t know? Well, it turns out, Ehrman tells us that we actually don’t know if there was any pagan resurrection. Thus, as is so well put in this response to Ehrman from Doherty: “Not only must any dependence on the mystery cults be refuted on Christianity’s own turf, the war has been carried further afield in an attempt to eliminate even the alleged sources. Thus, the armies of Christian independence are dispatched to the enemy’s home territory, there to destroy its own precepts.” But why would mythicists just take unsupported evidence and come up with the exact same conclusion about dying-and-rising gods that the second century apologists happened to take? Apparently, much like Justin’s devils, who supposedly took the idea of Perseus being born of a virgin from Isaiah (despite Isaiah not mentioning a virgin), mythicists have stolen obscure passages from the Old Testament and perverted them so as to create false gods for the sole purpose of mocking Christianity. In our final part of this review, Ehrman dons his crusader helmet and does battle in pagan territory against the virgin birth, atonement, and resurrection:

“When Christians said that Jesus was born of a virgin, for instance, they came to mean that Jesus’s mother had never had sex. In most of the cases of the divine men, when the father is a god and the mother is mortal, sex is definitely involved. The child is literally part human and part deity. The mortal woman is no virgin; she has had divine sex.” (214)

In my Catholic junior high school, my religion teacher once said that the difference between the Greek demi-gods and Jesus was that Heracles or Perseus was half man and half god, whereas Jesus was all man and all God. Both of these explanations appear to be carefully constructed literalist rationalizations of differentiation that leave not a figurative inch of imaginative variation. I could bring up Perseus’ mother, who was impregnated by a shower of golden light, as a counterexample to the point about “divine sex,” but really the whole argument misses the point. The motif of virgin birth, from Heracles to Perseus to Gilgamesh is symbolic of single motherhood. The Jewish tradition, as handed down by the Talmud, the Toledot and Celsus make a great deal about Jesus being a bastard, and this in turn is implied by the single motherhood in Mark, the four women of questionable purity in Matthew’s genealogy, and the saying recorded by the Gospel of Thomas: “Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore.”

“In other cases the parallels are simply made up. Where do any of the ancient sources speak of a divine man who was crucified as an atonement for sin?” (214)

As Carrier points out, this is a straw-man argument. Most mythicists do not claim the savior gods were crucified as an atonement for sin. Crucifixion and resurrection is close enough. However, it would not be at all surprising if some kind of blood atonement were involved in most of them. The “scapegoat” in Leviticus 16:8 that is allowed to “e-scape” bearing the people’s sins is called “azazel,” and the Book of Enoch has the fallen angel Azazel, who shows men how to make weapons and women how to use makeup, and then is cast out of heaven for doing so. This parallels Prometheus, who created man out of clay, gave a mysterious box (apple) to the first woman, Pandora (Eve), who unleashed all the evils on the world, stole fire from the gods for humans, and then was bound to a rock and tortured eternally for it by Zeus. The “classic” conception, from Hesiod to Enoch, is that Prometheus or Azazel was to blame, but by the 400s B.C., this dynamic became transposed, as in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which portrays Zeus as evil and Prometheus as the benefactor of humanity. The Sumerian version of Prometheus was Enki, the god who created humans out of clay and had the ark built during the flood. Enki was usually portrayed in a positive light, even after the rest of the elder gods were replaced by Ba’al. Enki’s city was Eridu, the first city in Sumer, and although later depictions made him out to be a bull god like Enlil (the Canaanite El the Bull), the earliest statuettes found of deities in Sumer are that of snake-men. Enki, is elsewhere portrayed as creating a garden paradise with bubbling streams coming up from the ground, as in Genesis 2:6. Both Enki and his son, the dying-and-rising god Dumuzi were said to been born from the oldest deity, the “Mother Dragon of Heaven,” Nammu. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Ea (Enki) puts the primeval deep-water god Apsu to sleep, Ba’al Marduk slays the monster Tiamat (Nammu) and creates the world with her corpse. Marduk also slays Qingu, a second consort to Tiamat, and mixes his blood with clay to create humans. Since Enki’s temple is called the House of Abzu, the deep-water god Apsu can be seen as an older version of Enki, with Tiamat/Nammu an older version of Inanna, and Qingu the sacrifice most likely a subsumed version of Dumuzi. The earlier Akkadians, whose language was Semitic, also had blood mixed with clay in the Epic of Atra-Hasis. The caduceus, a symbol of a serpent wrapped around a pole referenced in Numbers 21 and linked to resurrection in John 3:14, goes back to Sumerian culture, most famously on a cup dedicated to a virtual clone of Dumuzi named Ningishzida, and may go back to the early snake-cult of Enki as well since he was known as a healing god. The Mesopotamian Myth of Adapa also has the Kassite version of Adam (who in this myth is the first priest rather than the first man) dies at sea and is told by Ea (Enki) that in order to get into heaven, he must show sympathy for Dumuzi and Ningishzida, who both take the role of St. Peter as guardian of the pearly gates. Adapa then fails to eat and drink the bread and water of eternal life given to him by the god of heaven, Anu, based on false instructions from Ea that it is the bread and water of death. The conflict between Cain the shepherd and Abel the farm/city-dweller likewise parallels a Sumerian myth where Summer the shepherd god argued with his brother Winter the farmer god, both of them being ancient symbols of antagonism between the nomadic shepherds and city farmers. The “Asherah poles” that the “good” kings of Judah repeatedly tore down and destroyed were symbolic Trees of Life associated with the same cult, only their names were called Tammuz (Dumuzi) and Asherah (Inanna). Ezekiel complained about women ritually weeping for Tammuz at the temple in Jerusalem, proving that many women associated Yahweh with Tammuz. The mythic killing of the primordial goddess and her young lover in the Enuma Elish likewise symbolizes the same desire in the Babylonians to replace the vegetation god with the national war god. Just as Marduk slays Tiamat, Ba’al Hadad slays Lotan and Yahweh slays Leviathan. Thus the concepts of good and evil being tied in with elements of creation through clay, divine blood as sacrifice (atonement?) for mankind, the Tree of Life, a garden paradise of immortality, a forbidden fruit/box, defeat of the serpent, fire and civilization, brotherly strife, a Deluge of heavenly destruction, resurrection, entering heaven by sympathizing with the sacrifice of the dying-and-rising god, and eternal life all have ancient precedents.

The caduceus and the snake from Genesis may date back to a snake-cult in Mesopotamia

“There is another place where I seriously part company with Price. It simply is not true that all the stories in the Gospels, and all the details of stories, promote the mythological interests of the early Christians. The claim that Jesus had brothers named James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, along with several sisters, is scarcely a mythological motif; neither is the statement that he came from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth or that he often talked about seeds.” (217)

Wait a minute. What did Ehrman say back on page 197? “The historicity of Jesus does not depend on whether Nazareth existed. In fact, it is not even related to the question. The existence (or rather, nonexistence) of Nazareth is another mythicist irrelevancy.” Funny how this “mythicist irrelevancy” is one of the first things Ehrman brings up when he’s trying to think of historical elements that cannot be explained as mythological motifs. As we’ve seen, the names of the brothers relate to famous Galilean figures of the first century, the name of Nazareth is most likely a recent addition to Mark based perhaps on Nazarene, Nazarite, etc., and as Robert Funk points out, even those who believe in the historical Jesus recognize that “sowing and harvesting were figures commonly used as analogies in hellenistic rhetoric for pedagogical failures and successes. The only question was whether the parable was borrowed from that lore or whether Jesus was its creator.” (The Five Gospels 478).

The early story-tellers shaped their stories about Jesus according to the models available to them, making up details—and sometimes entire stories—or altering features here and there. But the fact they did so does have any bearing on whether Jesus really existed. That has to be decided on other grounds.” (218)

I’m still waiting for what those grounds could possibly be.

“Or to put the matter more correctly: what if it were true, historically, that the followers of Mithras portrayed him as having been born on December 25, as wearing a halo, and as having followers who were headed by a pope on Vatican Hill? What does that have to do with whether there lived a Jewish preacher from Nazareth named Jesus who was crucified by Pontius Pilate?” (218)

Jesus could have been a Jewish preacher or a dying-and-rising god, or both, but he cannot have been neither of them. Therefore, establishing connections between Jesus and other dying-and-rising gods is relevant to the question “Did Jesus Exist?”

“Having read Mettinger’s book carefully, I do not think that it will provide much support for the mythicist view of pagan dying and rising gods. For one thing, even though Mettinger claims that such views were known in Palestine around the time of the New Testament, he does not provide a shred of evidence. He instead quotes from the Old Testament (his field of experience): Ezekiel 8:14; Zechariah 12:11; and Daniel 11:37. But you can look at the passages yourself. None of them mentions the dying and rising of a god. So how do you prove that such a god was known in Palestine?” (224)

Since when does the Old Testament ever go into great detail about the rival gods Yahweh was so jealous over? Ezekiel complained about the women of Jerusalem “weeping for Tammuz” over his death at the Jerusalem Temple, the same god Daniel calls “the one beloved by women.” The name Dumuzi itself means “True son,” he is often referred to as a shepherd, and in one kingly incarnation, he is called a fisherman. The Sumerian love poem “The Marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi,” a genre which directly inspired the Song of Solomon, speaks of a sacrament involving Inanna serving Dumuzi bread and water. This would be more convincing if it were bread and wine, but Dumuzi’s sister Gesthinanna, who helps him escape from the demons chasing him, was herself a wine goddess. In Inanna’s descent to the nether world, Dumuzi’s wife went down into the netherworld to confront her sister Ereshkigal and was “turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook. After three days and three nights had passed, her minister Nincubura… made a lament for her in her ruined (houses)” Dumuzi’s father, the Promethean god Enki, sends spirits to bring her back, but she must provide a substitute, which turns out to be Dumuzi, who is sitting on his throne beneath “the great apple tree in the plain of Kulaba.” The demons attack and Dumuzi gets away when the sun god turns him into a snake, but the demons eventually bring him down to be hung as substitute for Inanna. Inanna weeps for Dumuzi, matching the ritual weeping of the women at the Jerusalem Temple, but then is able to find him and work out a deal where he would return to life for half the year. “You for half the year and your sister for half the year:” that is, Dumuzi would go to the netherworld on the Winter Solstice (Christmas) when all the vegetation died, and would rise during the Spring Equinox (Easter) when the vegetation returned. The story, which goes back to the third millennium B.C., has a direct parallel with the Greek myth of Aphrodite (Inanna) and Presephone (Ereshkigal) taking turns with the Adonis after he dies. As for Zechariah, the verse shows the same kind of ritual weeping for Hadad-Rimmon. In the Epic of Ba’al, found in Ugarit just north of Galilee and dated to around the 1400s B.C., the god Hadad is called “Rider of Clouds,” equal to that of Yahweh in Psalm 68:4, crushes the sea god Yamm just as Yahweh crushes Leviathan in Psalm 74:14, enjoins a festival of bread and wine, then ascends a mountain and establishes his temple just as Yahweh does in Psalm 68:18-29. Mot, the god of death and sterility says of Hadad that “I shall put Him in the grave of the Gods of the earth.” After that, “Baal is found dead in the fields of Shechelememet, in the land of Deber. The news reaches the ears of El, Father of Shunem. First the father god El and then Baal’s wife, the “Virgin” Anath cry out: “Baal is dead! Woe to the people of Dagon’s son! Woe to the multitudes of Athat-Baal! I shall go down into the earth!” Like Inanna, Anath “weeps for him and buries Him. She puts Him in the grave of the Gods of the earth.” She then seeks out Mot, who tells her “I met Aliyan Baal; I made Him like a lamb in My mouth. Like a kid in My jaws was He crushed.” But after a dream she realizes that “Aliyan Baal is alive” and the sun goddess Shapash “descends into the underworld. She enters the relm of Sheol. Upon her return to the world above, she carries Great Baal with Her” so that “Baal returns to the throne of His kingship.” Thus, Baal escapes the god of death just as Psalm 68:20 reads: “This God of ours is a God who saves; from Lord Yahweh comes escape from death;” (NJB). Mettinger and others agree that the god descending and ascending are connected to the seasonal changes, but try to make a distinction between “dying” and “descending to the underworld” as well as “resurrecting” and “rising to heaven,” but even this literalist diversion by semantics does not hold up to the primary sources. Ritual mourning was for the dead, not the hidden. Sumerian iconography of Dumuzi clearly shows him rising from the grave. “Hadad is dead” and then “alive.”

No rising from the dead here! Just a friendly game of hide-and-go-seek.

“Can anyone cite a single source of any kind that clearly indicates that people in rural Palestine, say, in the days of Peter and James, worshipped a pagan god who died and rose again? You can trust me, if there was a source like that, it would be talked about by everyone interested in early Christianity. It doesn’t exist.” (224)

Jerome writes that “From Hadrian’s time [135 A.D.] until the reign of Constantine, for about 180 years…Bethlehem, now ours, and the earth’s, most sacred spot…was overshadowed by a grove of Tammuz, which is Adonis, and in the cave where the infant Messiah once cried, the paramour of Venus was bewailed.” Ehrman can hardly claim that Jerome was making up a parallel between Tammuz and Jesus to show they were similar. Jerome makes no mention of the fact that Adonis or Tammuz are death and resurrection gods and claims that pagans profaned the originally Christian grove and replaced it with their own god. More likely, the reverse was true and that it had always been a shrine to Tammuz. The name Bethlehem itself can mean either “House of Bread” or “House of Lahmu.” (Lahmu was Enki’s temple gatekeeper.) Hadrian himself created a new cult in 130 A.D. dedicated to the rebirth of his lover Antinous after the youth drowned in the Nile, associating him with both Osiris and Bacchus and modeling it after the Eleusinian mystery cult that they were both members of. As shown by Kenneth Humphreys, a fourth century stele from Antinoopolis, Egypt shows him naked holding a cross and wine-grapes, his face an almost perfect likeness of a sixth or seventh century Coptic stele of Jesus holding a cross with wine-grapes. Not long afterwards, Hadrian put down the last Jewish revolt, exiled all Jews from Jerusalem, and rebuilt the city as a Roman colony name Aeila Capitolina, a name the Greek Christian bishops of the city preferred to Jerusalem. Julian the Apostate’s arrival in Antioch on July 18, 363, coincided with a festival in which people mourned for Adonis’ death in the streets. Augustus himself funded two temples to the Great Mother Cybele, whose Ara Pietatis relief shows the dying-and-rising god Attis. The talisman of Orpheus-Bacchus crucified on a cross below seven stars, dated to the first or second century Rome, is on the cover of The Jesus Mysteries. Another relief of Orpheus on a sacramental bowl in Romania, dated to the 200s or 300s A.D., shows Dionysus holding a fisher’s net and staff, wheat and grapes growing above his shoulders. Then there’s the 2,000-year-old necropolis accidentally discovered in 2006 underneath the Vatican’s foundations showing a mosaic floor of Dionysus and sarcophagi exhibiting carvings of both Christian and pagan iconography, such as an egg symbolizing pagan rebirth in one and the carving of man praying like a Christian on another. The Victorian scholar Reverened Sabine Baring-Gould wrote in his book Curious Myths of the Middle Ages that the tenth century Mesopotamian named Ibn Wahshiya “the Chaldean” confirmed that the Nabataeans, who controlled Damascus when Paul was said to have had his vision on the way there, were still “weeping for Tammuz” up until they adopted Christianity in the 300s. The Arabic Book of Rolls describes the mourning ritual of Tammuz as still being practiced in the city of Harran during the month of Tammuz in the 900s A.D. Sumerian statues of Inanna also have unmistakable artistic qualities – large breasts held by tiny hands, huge hips moving down to pinprick feet, and a beaded, faceless head – that connects it with the Venus of Willendorf and other primordial mother goddesses who have been dated as far back as 29,000 years ago.

The naked one is Antinous.

Walking staff? Check. Fishing net? Check. Bread/wheat? Check. Wine/grapes? Check.

“It is worth emphasizing that even Mettinger himself does not think that his sparse findings are pertinent to the early Christian claims about Jesus as one who died and rose again.” (224)

Funny how Ehrman keeps complaining about mythicists not being Biblical scholars, but when he delves into the Classicist’s foray, he looks up another Bible scholar.

“The Jewish notion of resurrection is closely tied to a world-view that scholars have labeled Jewish apocalypticism… When the earliest Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, it was in the context of this Jewish notion of the soon-to-come resurrection.” (225-226)

A future historian might look back at us and say Jesus’ resurrection could not have been celebrated every Easter because it was connected to apocalypticism. Baldr is another vegetation god whose death and resurrection was both seasonal (he was shot by a mistletoe, a parasitic plant that survives on tree branches during the winter) and also connected to the Norse apocalypse, Ragnarok (his death triggers a string of events that eventually leads to the end of the world).

“[From Mettinger:] In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.” (227)

Mettinger must have a really loose definition for the word “unambiguous.”

“With respect to ancient reports of the Greek Adonis, for example, there were in antiquity two forms of the myth, which only later were combined into a kind of megamyth. In the first form two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, compete for the affections of the human infant Adonis. Zeus (or in some of the myths Calliope) decides in Solomon-like fashion that Adonis will spend part of each year with each divinity, half the year with Aphrodite in the realms above, with the other gods, and the other half with Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. There is nothing here to suggest either the death or resurrection of Adonis. Part of the year he is in one place (the realm of the living) and part of the other (the realm of the dead). The other more familiar form of the myth comes from the Roman author Ovid. In this account the young man Adonis is killed by a boar and is then mourned and commemorated by the goddess Aphrodite in the form of a flower. In this version, then, Adonis definitely dies. But there is nothing to suggest that he was raised from the dead.” (227)

Wait a minute. So in one myth Adonis moves in a seasonal rotation between “the realm of the dead” and the “realm of the living,” but that doesn’t suggest “either death or resurrection,” and then in the other myth, Adonis dies, but there’s no resurrection, so neither counts? The situation seems very similar to the Pauline Epistles and the Gospel of Mark. The Pauline Epistles has Jesus descending and rising between the heavens and the lower planes but does not give actually give a full description of exactly how and why Jesus died and the Gospel of Mark gives a full description of Jesus’ death but does not technically show Jesus’ resurrection, having only implied it. So too with the story of Adonis being gored by the boar: Aphrodite sprinkles nectar into Adonis’ blood and flowers spring up as a symbolic resurrection. Orphic Hymn #54, which is either from the late Hellenistic period or early Roman period, says: “At stated periods doom’d to set and rise, with splendid lamp, the glory of the skies. Two-horn’d and lovely, reverenc’d with tears, of beauteous form, adorn’d with copious hairs.” Is Adonis really being “doom’d to set and rise” and be “reverenc’d with tears” without actually dying and resurrecting?

“It is only in later texts, long after Ovid and after the rise of Christianity, that one finds any suggestion that Adonis came back to life after his death. Smith argues that this later form of the tradition may in fact have been influenced by Christianity and its claim that a human had been raised from the dead.” (228)

So Ehrman admits that Adonis moved between the underworld and the heavens, and that Adonis died, but his worshippers needed to copy the idea of the resurrection part of that equation from Christianity, that tiny Jewish peasant religion that Ehrman says no one could ever invent because its central precept of a crucified Messiah was too abhorrent. You know, because Hades=Death :: Heaven=Resurrection is just too complex a concept for those Adonis worshippers.

“But his wife, Isis went on a search to recover and reassemble them, leading to Osiris’ rejuvenation. The key point to stress, however, is that Osiris does not—decidedly does not—return to life.” (228)

Right… he’s just “rejuevanated.”

“The same can be said, in Smith’s view, of all the other divine beings often pointed to as pagan forerunners of Jesus. Some die but don’t return; some disappear without dying and do return; but none of them die and return. Jonathan Z. Smith’s well documented views have made a large impact on scholarship. Mark Smith is a scholar of the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible who also opposes any notion of dying and rising gods in the ancient world. Mark Smith makes the compelling argument that when Frazer devised is theory about dying and rising gods, he was heavily influenced by his understanding of Christianity and Christian claims about Christ. But when one looks at the actual data about the pagan deities, without the lenses provided by later Christian views, there is nothing to make one consider them as gods who die and rise again.” (228-229)

So mythicists, who are overwhelmingly represented by atheists and Classicists, are looking at it through a Christian-viewed lens, and those who defend a historical Jesus, who are overwhelmingly represented by theologians and Bible scholars, understand the meaning better in Classical terms?

“The majority of scholars agree with the views of Smith and Smith: there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christanity believed in dying and rising gods, let alone that it was a widespread view held by lots of pagans in lots of times and places.” (230)

When Ehrman says scholars, does he mean Biblical scholars or ancient religion scholars?

“One passage mythicists appeal to, however, may on the surface seem to suggest that Paul, writing before the Gospels, understood Jesus as God who died and rose again (comparable to dying and rising deities). This is the much-debated “hymn”—as it is called—found in Philippians 2:6-11… Even though mythicists typically treat it as unambiguous evidence of their views, the reality is that there is almost nothing unambiguous in the passage. Every word and phrase has been pored over and debated by scholars using the most sophisticated tools of analysis that are available. And still there is no consensus on what the passage means. But one thing is clear: it does not mean what mythicists typically claim it means. It does not portray Jesus in the guise of a pagan dying and rising god, even if that is what, on a superficial reading, it may appear to be about.” (233)

Translation: “Hey, we may not have an answer for this one, but we still worked a lot harder than the mythicists in trying to come up with something other than what it appears to be.”

“Another option is that this is describing Christ as a preexistent angelic being… In these cases, though, the angels may appear like God (in the “form” of God), but they are not actually God. It is striking that a number of Jewish traditions speak of an angel being exalted to the level of God, sitting on a throne next to that of the Almighty.” (237)

That is Metatron, ascribed to Elisha ben Abuya, which the Toledot identifies with Paul.

“And so the speeches of Acts, which must date well before any of our Gospels, and almost certainly predate the writings of Paul himself, indicate that it was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Lord, the Christ, the Son of God (Acts 2:36; 13:32-33). This is the view of the creed that Paul quotes in Romans 1:3-4 as well. Some Christians were not content with the idea that Jesus was the Son of God only at his resurrection, however, and came to think that he must have been the Son of God for his entire public ministry. And so we have traditions that arose indicating that Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism. That may be the view still found in our earliest Gospel, Mark, who begins his narrative with Jesus being baptized and hearing the voice of God from heaven declaring him his son.” (238)

Here, Ehrman has a point. The problem is its inconsistent. Romans 8:29 says that “those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…” 1 Corinthians 8:5-6 says: “Indeed, even though there are many so-called gods in heaven and earth… yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” Jesus is also declared the Son of God at his death in Mark by the centurion.

“Jesus is called Christ in Paul, Mark, M, L, John, Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, and so on. It is important to remember what this term meant in ancient Judaism.” (240)

Marcion’s version of Luke, which I believe is the earlier version, instead used the term “Chrestus” or “Righteous One,” a term that may have some relation to the “Teacher of Righteousness.” Josephus also refers to Honi the Circle Drawer as “righteous” and Tacitus also uses the term “Chrestus,” not “Christus.”

“For one thing, while it is true that Paul calls Jesus the Wisdom of God in I Corinthians, that is not the normal way that he refers to him and is certainly not the way he first thought of him. There is no reason to privilege this conception over the many others that can be found in Paul.” (244)

The same could be said for arguing Paul only saw the Son of God as incarnate after the crucifixion.

“It should not be objected—as Wells does—that the poetic passage in Colossians that I quoted at length shows that Paul understood Christ as Wisdom incarnate. There is a fatal objection to this view. Paul almost certainly did not write the letter to the Colossians. It is one of the forgeries in Paul’s name, written after his death, as critical scholars have recognized for a very long time. And to argue that the passage derives from a pre-Pauline tradition is problematic. Colossians is post-Pauline, so on what grounds can we say that a passage in it is pre-Pauline?” (245-246)

It seems when Biblical scholars debate whether Colossians is Pauline – with their “sophisticated tools of analysis” – then there is “wide agreement that the passage appears to be poetic—possibly some kind of hymn (that is what everyone used to think) or a creed (this is more plausible)—and that Paul appears to be quoting it rather than composing it. But even this is debated…” (235). But when a mythicist refers to the exact same quote, it suddenly becomes a unanimous decision that Colossians is a forgery that “critical scholars have recognized for a long time” and even the idea that it might be based on something earlier is “problematic.”

“This is the kind of weak assertion that Wells typically makes. He provides no solid ground for think ing that Paul imagined Jesus to have lived in the remote past—certainly nothing to suggest that his life ended during the reign of King Jannaeus.” (248)

Wells refers to the Talmud, which explicitly states it. Apparently, Ehrman did not really read much of Wells or the Talmud.

“What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew?… The reason the passage [I Corinthians 15:3-5] is highly relevant to our discussion here is that Paul gives no indication at all that a hundred years or more passed between Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance to the apostles.” (249)

So an obscure peasant being recently crucified is something “everyone” would know, but the time period between Yeshu’s death and the present would had to have been known and referenced?

“It is hard to believe that Paul would have such a radically different view from every other Christian of his day, as Wells suggests. That Jesus lived recently is affirmed not only in all four of our canonical Gospels (where, for example, he is associated with John the Baptist and is said to have been born under the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, under the rulership of the Jewish king Herod, and so on); it is also the view of all the Gospel sources—Q (which associates Jesus with John the Baptist), M, and L—and of the non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus (who both mention Pilate).” (251)

And what Christians would those be? Most of early documents that were not Proto-Orthodox have been lost and, as with the Gospels of Marcion and Cerinthus, typically presumed by Biblical scholars without debate to be late and historically worthless. The Jesus of Mark and Matthew could easily have been a fictional character used to allegorize the church, Luke and John were not referenced until the 170s-180s, and Acts says that the name Christian only came up in Antioch after Barnabas and Saul started teaching there. And it’s not true that all the gospels date Jesus’ birth to King Herod: Luke dates Jesus’ birth to Roman census following Herod’s death. In fact, that can be seen as a highly symbolic date for the birth of Jewish Messianic beliefs because that is when the Romans took direct control over Judea rather than controlling it through the puppet king Herod. The John the Baptist passages are relegated to the third layer of Q – really only because they are not in Mark – and they do not include John baptizing Jesus. M and L are even weaker alibis for a first century Jesus: what evidence is there that places Jesus in the first century A.D. in those? In fact, L includes Jesus speaking to a “legal expert” who quotes the first century B.C. religious teacher Hillel. The verse in Luke 7:40 where Jesus tells “Simon the Leper” to leave the woman anointing his feet alone (the same context from Mark in which Judas betrays him) and Luke 22:31 in which Jesus warns Simon of Satan taking him over may have a better context in which Simon is Jesus’ enemy rather than his disciple, which fits more into the role of Simon Ben Shetach’s hostility to both Yeshu and Honi the Circle Drawer. But far more convincingly, Burkett’s book From Proto-Mark to Mark has shown that the story of Stephen being stoned to death in Acts was taken from a Passion source that was also used for Jesus’ death in his gospel, which means L very likely had Jesus stoned to death by rule of the Sanhedrin without the Romans, just as he is in the Talmud and the Toledot.

“These sources, I should stress, are all independent of one another; some of them go back to Palestinian traditions that can be readily be dated to 31 or 32 CE, just a year or so afte the traditional date of Jesus’s death” (251)

What proof is there that any of those sayings sources go back to 31 or 32 CE? These dates are obviously based on the assumption of Jesus’ crucifixion and so the premise is entirely based on circular logic.

“He quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis.” (252)

Since when do you have to agree with everything a scholar says in order to quote them? Everyone knows that mythicists are in the extreme minority and it’s not like he’s trying to insinuate otherwise.

“Like Wells before him, Doherty refuses to allow that I Thessalonians—which explicitly says that the Jews (or the Judeans) were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus—can be used as evidence of Paul’s view: it is, he insists, an insertion into Paul’s writings, not from the apostle himself. (Here we find, again, textual studies driven by convenience: if a passage contradicts your views, simply claim that it was not actually written by the author.)” (253)

This view is shared by Helmut Koester, Burton Mack, Paula Fredriksen and Hyam Maccoby, each of whom believe in the gospel Jesus. In any case, the verse is equally problematic for those who believe in the gospel Jesus because it makes no mention of the Romans but lays the entire blame on the Jews, something that would be hardly acceptable in its historical context. It is also especially hard to date before the 70s since it speaks of some all-encompassing retribution. Ehrman should know this is a controversial verse, so it seems dishonest to insinuate that it is only questioned by mythicists.

“It is true that Plato and his followers had a certain view of realiy where, roughly speaking, this material world is but a reflection of the world of “forms.” But Platonism was simply one of the ancient philosophies popular at the time of Christianity. Also popular was Stoicism, with a completely different, nondualistic sense of the world; Stoicism lacked the notion that this realm is an imitation of the higher realm. So too did Epicureanism, which thought in fairly modern fashion that the material world is all there is. Why should we assume that the mystery cults were influenced by just one of these philosophies? Or for that matter any of them? What evidence does Doherty cite to show that mystery religions were at heart Platonic? Precisely none.” (254-255)

Is Ehrman trying to say that Plato wasn’t really that influential? Western philosophy is typically divided between the pre-Platonic and post-Platonic eras. It’s often been said that all of Western philosophy is “just a series of footnotes to Plato.” William Blake said: “If Christianity were morality, then Socrates is the Savior.” Cynicism is heavily interrelated with Platonism (with many ancients attributing its founding, perhaps falsely, to Socrates’ other student Antisthenes) and Stoicism was heavily interrelated with both Cynicism and Platonism. The Stoics saw the cosmos as a spherical continuum of matter held together by the power of God through the causality of the spirit that pervades it, which fits well with the conceptual landscape of the Pauline epistles. And the third century Stoic Plotinus did in fact espouse metaphysics based on three hypostases reflecting emanations from the One that are in imitation of the higher realm. Tertullian said the Valentinian cosmology “was of Plato’s school” and that “Marcion’s better god, with all his tranquility, he came from the Stoics,” a statement I fully agree with, but is odd coming from him since Tertullian believed their versions of the gospels, John and Luke, had material deleted (not added!) from them. If you take all of the Hellenistic apologetics about the Old Testament out of the Pauline Epistles, then you are mostly left with is a heavily spiritualized form of Stoicism. And it is widely believed that Plato took many of his ideas from the Orphic mysteries, such as the belief that the soul is entrapped in the body, although Plato criticized them for proselytizing door to door and offering atonement for sin. Like Zoroastrianism and Egyptian beliefs, the belief in heaven and hell was also an important part of Orphic teachings, which relates to the epistles’ heavy emphasis on salvation.

“When, in his second edition, Doherty admits that we do not know what the followers of the mystery cults thought, he is absolutely correct. We do not know. But he then asserts that they thought like the later Platonist Plutarch… Very rarely do common people think about the world the way upper-class, highly educated, elite philosophers do… The entire enterprise of philosophical reflection on ancient mythology was rooted precisely in the widely accepted fact that common people did not look at the world, or its myths, in the same way philosophers did. Elite philosophers tried to show that the myths accepted by others were emblematic of deeper spiritual truths.” (255)

…unlike those stupid Gnostics who literally believed Thomas was the twin brother of Jesus but didn’t understand biology.

“I hardly need to emphasize again that the early followers of Jesus were not elite philosophers. They were by and large common people. Not even Paul was philosophically trained. To be sure, as a literate person he was far better educated than most Christians of his day. But he was no Plutarch. His worldview was not principally dependent on Plato. It was dependent on the Jewish traditions, as these were mediated through the Hebrew scriptures… There are no grounds for assuming that Paul, whose views of Jesus were taken over from the Palestinian Jewish Christians who preceded him, held a radically different view of Jesus from his predecessors.” (255-256)

Other than calling the whole of the Jewish Law a curse and getting into a disagreement over eating kosher foods with Cephas and James in Antioch?

“Paul tells us about his background. He was raised a highly religious Jew, and he was a Pharisee. Were Pharisaic Jews influenced by the mystery cults? Did they spend their days plumbing the depths of the myths about Attis and Osiris? Did they look deeply into the mysteries of Isis and Mithras?” (256)

Hyam Maccoby makes a good case that the Pauline epistles better reflect Gnostic theology than Pharisaic teachings. I believe the core of the Pauline epistles is Gnostic, with an early version of 1 Corinthians perhaps originally being used by the Pentacoastal-like tongue-speaking Montanists and Galatians originating as the centerpiece theology of the anti-Old Testament Marcionites.

“The Law was given to the Jewish people not as some kind of onerous burden that they had to bear—as so many Christians today seem to think—but for the opposite reason: to provide guidance to God’s people about how they should worship him and relate to one another in their communal lives together.” (273)

What gave Christians this idea that the Law is an onerous burden? That “highly religious Jew” with the Pharisee background.

“So the stories about Jesus the miracle-working five-year-old who could wither his playmates when they irritated him—as found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—are not historically reliable, since those stories serve a Christian purpose of showing that Jesus was a powerful Son of God even before his public ministry” (291-292).

That’s not the criterion of dissimilarity. That’s the criterion of basic common sense.

“We saw how the story that Jesus was crucified created enormous headaches for the Christian mission because no Jews would have expected a crucified messiah. This tradition clearly passes the criterion of dissimilarity. Given the additional fact that it is so thoroughly probable that in fact Jesus was crucified. That is far more probable than an alternative claim, for example, that he was stoned to death or that he ascended without dying or even that he simply lived out his life and died as an old man in Nazareth, none of which is ever mentioned in our sources.” (292)

So Jesus being stoned to death is about as historically likely as him ascending into heaven without dying? Using the criterion of disimiliarity against the mythicist argument entails the assumption that anyone inventing the idea could invent anything and chose what to invent based on the least headaches it would evoke to future Christologies? This whole attitude that anything dissimilar to Orthodox Christianity and Judaism must go back to Jesus was dropped after the Second Quest and the adoption of Form Criticism. Besides that, why would a Messiah being stoned to death be any easier to deal with than a crucified Messiah?

“Or take the details of Jesus’s life. The idea that he had brothers does not serve any clear-cut Christian agenda. It is simply taken as a statement of fact by the early authors who mention it (Paul, Mark, John, Josephus).” (292)

It is not just given as a statement of fact in either Mark or John. Both Mark and John use the brothers to make hostile theological statements against some group, Galilean zealots for Mark and probably the James’ sect in Jerusalem for John.

“Conversely, the likelihood of Jesus entering into Jerusalem straddling two donkeys and with the crowd shouting out that he was the messiah is decreased by the circumstance that had such an event really happened (unlikely as it is on its own terms), Jesus would no doubt have been arrested by the authorities on the spot instead of a week later.” (293)

Here, Ehrman actually makes a good point. The Toledot also echoes this tradition; only it gives details the gospels do not, such as having 310 probably armed disciples with him. Had this event happened in the first century B.C., then the explanation that the authorities did not arrest him because they were afraid the crowds would riot becomes far more plausible.

“Archaeological work on Nazareth indicates that it was a small hamlet with no evidence of any wealth whatsoever… After he began his public ministry, we have reports that the people of his hometown had trouble understanding what happened to him, how he could suddenly seem so wise and insightful into the religious traditions of Israel (Mark 6; Luke 4). This suggests that he was not a wunderkind growing up but an altogether average person. (295-296)

The story in Mark sets up a wisdom saying about all prophets not being accepted in their homeland, which probably reflects the author’s time period rather than Jesus’. And the story in Luke has Jesus in a synagogue that is anachronistic even for most first century cities, much less small hamlets with no wealth. It hardly qualifies as evidence of what Jesus’ childhood was like.

“But if, as seems probable, Jesus was widely seen among his followers as an expert interpreter of the Torah, this may suggest that he could read and study the texts.” (296)

What is this based on? The childhood story of Jesus teaching the scholars at the temple that Luke stole from Josephus’ autobiography?

“Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic preacher. But students wish that I would also present “the other side.” I sympathize with the concern, but I also recognize why it is a problem. The semester lasts only fifteen weeks… I could present the evidence that other scholars offer for seeing Jesus as something else. But which other side would I choose: that Jesus was a political revolutionary? A proto-Marxist? A proto-feminist? A countercultural hero? A Jewish holy man? A Jewish Cynic philosopher? A married man with children?” (298)

“Political revolutionary” and “Jewish Cynic philosopher” should both be addressed. The semester isn’t that long. “Proto-feminism” might not be a bad subject to touch upon in the context of Montanism and the Pauline verse about “neither male nor female.” One wonders why Ehrman didn’t bother to write an entire book against the idea of Jesus the first century married man with children since even Dan Brown seems to outrank the Christ-Myth hypothesis. If Ehrman had chosen that topic, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to add so much filler. Actually, the Toledot does say that Yeshu was married (not to Mary Magdalene) and that his sons were with him during the Triumphal Entry, which unlike the mention of Jesus’ family in Mark, really is an anecdote that has nothing to do with the plot of the narrative or can be construed symbolically. This is a far better fit for the criterion of dissimiliarity than the gospel story about Jesus’ hometown not opening up to Jesus’ message.

“The Law was a central component of Jesus’s teaching… From Q: Jesus states that it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for a single dot of the Law to pass away… I should stress that some of these multiply attested sayings appear to pass the criterion of dissimilarity. For example, in the first passage mentioned (Mark 10:17-27), when a rich man asks Jesus how to have eternal life, he tells him to “keep the commandments.”… The early Christians maintained that a person had to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus for eternal life… So why is Jesus portrayed in this passage as saying that salvation comes to those who keep the Law? Because that is something he actually said… Unlike certain Pharisees, Jesus did not think that what really mattered before God was the scrupulous observance of the laws in all their details.” (309-310)

When the story came out that Hebrew Nation meat products were not “100% kosher,” Jon Stewart of the Daily Show joked, “Or as it’s known to Jews: not kosher!” How can Jesus have said that that not “a single dot of the Law” could “pass away” yet at the same time not believe in “the scrupulous observance of the laws in all their details”? Those two statements are in complete contradiction. Furthermore, Ehrman just got finished explaining how since John the Baptist was apocalyptic before Jesus, and Paul was apocalyptic after Jesus, then Jesus must have been apocalyptic as well. But assuming everything Ehrman believes is true, if John believed in a strict observance of the Law, as suggested by his complaint that Herod broke an obscure law about marrying your brother’s x-wife (a particularly strict interpretation of Lev. 18:20), and if Jesus’ brother James had a strict interpretation of the Torah, as described by Josephus, then by that logic doesn’t that mean Jesus’ interpretation of the Law was also strict, in contradiction to the gospels? In fact, Mark even has Jesus allowing his disciples to pluck corn on the Sabbath and denying all kosher laws by saying nothing put into the mouth can make you unclean, a complete dismissal of the Torah! Keeping the Ten Commandments for salvation may seem Jewish, but in contrast to keeping all the Torah laws, it’s rather lax. Plus, in Acts 15:20, the second James decides that Gentiles would only have to abstain from things like polluted from idols, fornication, strangled animals, and blood, which correlates to the “Noahide Laws” for Gentiles in the Talmud, rules that are roughly equivalent to the Ten Commandments except that they dosn’t contain prohibitions against worshiping another god, the Sabbath, and coveting. These rules are more universal but still somewhat ritualistic. If Jesus taught that ritualistic laws were unimportant for Jews, why would James enforce rituals on Gentiles? And if Jesus taught the Ten Commandments were necessary for salvation, why would the Jerusalem Church cite Pharasaic Law for Gentiles in its stead? In fact, if you read on, Mark goes out of order and lists the commandments against [#6] murder, [#7] adultery, [#8] stealing, [#?] defrauding, and [#5] dishonoring ones parents. Mark has notably skipped having no other gods, graven images, and the Sabbath, all of which are particularly problematic for Christians both then and now, plus added one against fraud. An observant Jew would never had written such a thing. Since dishonoring one’s parents as the “first” commandment would stick out like a thumb, that one was relegated to the end so that the more universal laws take their place according to where they “should” be: with murder being the most egregious sin. Thus, Mark appears to be trying to convert the concept of the Ten Commandments into one of a universal code (like the Noahide Law) very similar to the way conservative Christians today attempt to claim that Western Civilization is based on the Ten Commandments while at the same time not accepting the plain interpretation that worshipping Jesus breaks the first commandment, kneeling at a cross or wearing a crucifix breaks the second commandment, and working on Saturday breaks the fourth commandment. (Of course, the complaint could be made that Mark didn’t worship Jesus, but assuming the Christ-Myth is right, he would have known others who did, especially if his reference in 9:38 to John trying to stop other Jesus sects from preaching meant he was aware of the Johannine Tradition).

“”Truly I say to you, that you who have followed me, in the new world, when the Son of Man is sitting on the throne of his glory, you will be seated—even you-on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28) That this saying probably goes back to Jesus himself is suggested by the fact that it is delivered to all twelve disciples, including, of course, Judas Iscariot. No one living after Jesus’s death, who knew that he had been betrayed by one of his own (as reported in all our early sources), would have made up a saying in which the betrayer would be one of the rulers of the future kingdom.” (318)

Yet Ehrman has no problem with the statements from 1 Corinthians that after Jesus was “betrayed”/”handed over,” he appeared to Cephas and then to “the twelve.” Ehrman says this was immediately after Jesus’ death and yet they have already replaced the twelfth disciple? Why would the disciples recruit a twelfth disciple before they saw the resurrected Jesus? According to Acts, they recruited Matthais, but that was because they had already seen Jesus’ resurrection and even his ascension. The Twelve were not disciples of Jesus, but preachers of Jesus, and that the names from the gospels were only added later to symbolize certain sects with the Jesus movement. Thus there’s no reason to believe this verse in Matthew had to go back to a historical Jesus.

“We do not have any indication that Jesus entered into direct conflict with the Essenes, although it should be clear that his interpretation of the apocalyptic realities that were bearing down on the world was very different from theirs. Whereas they believed in separating themselves from the rest of society so as to maintain their personal and communal purity, Jesus believed in spending time with the impure, the “tax collectors and sinners,” who would be the ones to be brought into the kingdom. Jesus’s views would have been anathema to the Qumran community.” (320)

We don’t really know if all Essenes were as strict as the Qumran community, and by the time Mark was written, the Romans had already destroyed that community. Its surviving members probably would have ended up destitute and living off handouts on the streets of neighboring towns with no more authoritarian figures enforcing Qumran’s strict rules on purity. Thus it wouldn’t be too hard to envision Essenes gradually losing their strict puritanical outlook.

“The idea that [Jesus] would personally destroy the Temple does not, of course, pass the criterion of dissimiliarity: Christians who considered him the all-powerful Lord may well have given the sayings that twist in order to show that after his death, he “got even” with Jews by destroying the Temple. Neither does it do well by the criterion of contextual credibility: it is hard to imagine Jesus as a one-man wrecking crew able to demolish entire buildings. Similarly problematic is the notion, found only in John, that when Jesus talked about the Temple being destroyed and raised in three days, he was actually speaking of his body (John 2:21)… One might be tempted to push the criterion of dissimilarity a bit further and claim that since the Temple was in fact destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, none of the predictions of Jesus can be safely trusted as actually going back to him—that is, that later Christians put predictions of its destruction on his lips to show his prophetic powers. Most scholars, though, consider this an extreme view since the predictions of the destruction on one level or another pass all of our criteria: (a) they are multiply attested (Mark, John, Acts, and Thomas); (b) in one respect at least, the earliest form of these sayings appears to pass the criterion of dissimilarity since Jesus’s claim in Mark that not one stone will be left upon another did not in fact come true, as you can see yourself by visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem today; if anyone actually knew the details of the destruction, they wouldn’t have invented this verse; and (c) just as important, the sayings are contextually credible. For we know of other prophetic figures throughout the history of Israel who maintained that the Jewish people had so strayed from God that he would enter into judgment against them by destroying their central place of worship.” (324-325).

It’s ironic that Ehrman not only denies that prediction about the Temple’s destruction is based on after-the-fact knowledge, but assumes most scholars take to the same idea. On page 48 he dates Mark to 70 (and Matthew and Luke to 85, and John to 90), following the majority of Biblical scholars, but the reason they date Mark to 70 is because of the predictions to the Temple being destroyed (and John to 90 because of it’s believed to be a reaction to the hypothetical Council of Jamnia, whose very existence, not to mention the link to John’s gospel, is based on very weak evidence). So Ehrman’s claims that we have evidence for a historical Jesus from first century gospels is based on evidence he doesn’t even believe in. Some scholars set the dating back to 65 to allow for Mark to have predicted the Temple’s destruction based on the rebellion. In fact, Ehrman in his other books uses that same range: 65-70. Mark probably did not know the full details of the Temple’s destruction, but while the “not one brick” statement is definitely an exaggeration, it does reflect the historic reality of seeing something amazingly large utterly demolished.

“As surprised as I was at the meeting of humanists to hear so much about religion, what I was not surprised to learn was that a good number of people there—at leat the ones I talked to—are either mythicists or leaning towards mythicism… By staking out a position that is accepted by almost no one else, they open themselves to mockery and to charges of intellectual dishonesty. But to accomplish their goals (about which I will say more in a moment), this is completely unnecessary. Of course, for mythicists, it goes without saying, belief in Jesus is a problem.” (333-334)

Finally we reach the pinnacle of Ehrman’s self-importance in his conclusion: Mythicists open themselves up to being labeled intellectually dishonest because no one would adopt such an unpopular position. Well, not unpopular at the humanist meeting Ehrman went to in order to receive an award, but unpopular among the people who matter: Biblical scholars like himself.

“It is no accident that virtually all mythicists (in fact, all of them, to my knowledge) are either atheists or agnostics.” (337)

This is somewhat true. There is a large undercurrent of anti-theism that fuels the Christ-Myth movement. However, there is also a large undercurrent of religious faith that fuels the biases of theologians and Biblical scholars. Taken in the form of a Hegelian triad, we could say:

Thesis: Most theologians and Biblical scholars believe in a historical Jesus and are either Christians or former Christians.

Antithesis: Most of those who argue for a mythical Jesus are either atheist or agnostic.

Synthesis: Robert Price, a former Baptist minister, is the only theologian and Biblical scholar who is also a mythicist, as well as the only writer who refers to himself as a “Christian atheist.”

“Their agenda is religious; and they are complicit in a religious ideology. They are not doing history; they are doing theology… But neither issue—the good done in the name of Christ or the evil—is of any relevance to me as a historian when I try to sacrifice the past in order to promote the worthy cause of my own social and political agendas. No one else should either. Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not.” (339)

Frank Zindler is part of an atheist group and writes against Christianity. Earl Doherty published his book under the name “Age of Reason Publications.” But Robert Price, G.A. Wells, and Alvar Ellegard do not really fit the mold of the tireless anti-theist. Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, and G.R.S. Mead have extremely positive attitudes towards Gnostic Christianity and belong or belonged to Gnostic-like groups. I know a former monk who was very open to the Christ-Myth theory because it implied that Christianity could be understood as a universal religion. Considering that the Sumerian Dumuzi is so closely connected to a goddess cult that survived for 25,000 years in all of Eurasia, such a concept might not be so far off. I myself believed in the historicity of the gospel Jesus for many years, although I still thought Biblical scholars were doing a disservice to their subject by ignoring Christianity’s relationship to the mystery religions and the problems inherent in the epistles. It was not until I learned of the existence of the first century B.C. Jesus in the Talmud and the Toledot that Doherty’s Jesus Puzzle and Ellegard’s Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ suddenly fell into place. I still enjoy reading other hypotheses on the historical Jesus and weighing in on them and I respect scholars with different opinions. But I do not like scholars who throw out more insults than facts. Mythicists may be made up of amateurs and Classicists, but Ehrman hardly proves his side the most professional in what has got to be the most error-ridden scholarly work I have ever read in my life. The fact that Ehrman takes such an extreme reaction towards mythicists– making their arguments out to be less relevant than Dan Brown conspiracy theories while at the same time focusing so much more vitriol on them than anyone else– gives a pretty good indication of who is letting their emotions get the better of them. Even if the parallels between dying and rising gods and the resurrection of Jesus were all just a coincidence, the mystery religions would still be relevant as a parallel psychological motif. Ehrman does not use the language of a scholar who desires a dialogue with mythicists. He appears to have sought out to learn the bare minimum necessary to write a book, filled in the bare bones with material he’s written about before, and then turned it into a personal attack on their intellectual integrity. Ehrman calls mythicism a religious agenda, but it is Ehrman’s Crusade against the dying and rising gods of the foreign lands of the Classicist which shows the true zeal of the pagan minimalist.

Last time, we saw how Ehrman started off his book with five chapters of ignoring mythicists, or what Ehrman calls “mounting the positive argument.” This consisted mostly of citing canonical books and hypothetical sources as independent witnesses for the historicity of Jesus as if mythicists were unaware of these things called gospels, and of alternatively labeling the Testimonium Flavian both “neutral” and “negative,” not that Ehrman says there was anything Josephus would necessarily be critical of Jesus about. From here, Ehrman moves on to actual mythicist arguments. “I will not try to refute every single point made by every single author,” warns Ehrman, since that would require “an enormous book, and trust me, it would not be a pleasant read.” Instead, Ehrman devotes a whole two chapters to “The Mythicists’ Claims” in his book on mythicists:

“Cephas was, of course, Simon Peter (see John 1:42), Jesus’s closest disciple. James, Paul tells us, was the Lord’s brother. These are two good people to know if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus. I wish I knew them.” (144)

Ehrman would hardly be alone in wishing to know the disciple or brother of the Son of God, yet Galatians calls them “those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality).”

“But it defies belief that Paul would have spent over two weeks with Jesus’s closest companion and not learned something about him—for example, that he lived… And so in the letter to the Galatians Paul states as clearly as possible that he knew Jesus’s brother. Can we get any closer to an eyewitness report than this? The fact that Paul knew Jesus’s closest disciple and his own brother throws a real monkey wrench into the mythicist view that Jesus never lived.” (145-146)

Then why doesn’t Paul ever mention the fact that they knew Jesus? Why doesn’t Paul call Cephas a “disciple” instead of “apostle”?

“Throughout our traditions Cephas and James are portrayed as being completely aligned with each other…. If there was a group called “the brothers of the Lord,” made up of zealous Jewish missionaries in Jerusalem, Cephas himself would certainly be a member” (150-151)

Actually, Galatians accused Cephas of living like a Gentile, but after men from James arrived, he started compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews so that even Barnabas was “led astray.” So according to Galatians, James is a strict follower of the Law and Cephas and Barnabas are religious centrists who fluctuate their attitude according to whether Judaic Christians are around. The author of Luke-Acts also paints Peter as the bridge between Paul and James, although a vision attributed to Peter in Acts 11:9 makes him proclaim that all food had been made clean, clearly bringing him more over to Paul’s side. In contrast to Peter, Luke-Acts seems to insinuate that James was a zealot. Shortly before Paul gets attacked by Jewish zealots in Jerusalem, James warns him that “You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews, and they are all zealous for the law. They have been told about you that you teach the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come.” James tells Paul to make an offering to prove he believes in the Law, which his epistles clearly say he didn’t, and he gets attacked by zealots anyway. So both Biblical traditions portray Peter and James as having different alignments.

“We have several traditions that Jesus actually had brothers (it is independently affirmed in Mark, John, Paul, and Josephus).” (151)

Despite Josephus’ writings being inundated with Jewish Messianic contenders, this passage and the Testimonium are the only two instances in which the word “Christ” appears, and the first one is an accepted forgery. Josephus was a prolific writer and it is extremely doubtful that he would add such an epithet without a proper explanation. In fact, Josephus relates how the high priest Ananus the Younger assembled a Sanhedrin and had this James and others stoned to death, which so angered the good standing people that they were able to petition the procurator to have Herod Antipas remove him from office, replacing him with Jesus son of Damneus. If this James was a Galilean peasant whose brother had been killed by the Romans, why would his death have caused such an uproar? (The crowds of Jeruaslem seem very fickle: first they welcome Jesus in the Triumphal Entry, then they call on Pilate to have him crucified, then they riot when Jesus’ brother is killed.) Why would Herod Antipas, who according to Luke had both Jesus and James the brother of John killed, remove the high priest for doing the same thing to Jesus’ brother? Wouldn’t the same people who became angered over James’ death be even more angry of Jesus’ death? Why does Josephus write far more material on the brother of “the one called Christ” than on Jesus himself? Was James more historically important than Jesus? If Agrippa deposed the high priest in order to appease the crowd, then wouldn’t it make sense to replace him with someone the crowd supported? In fact, if we assume James was originally said to have been the brother to the Jesus “son of Damneus” rather than Jesus “who is called Christ,” then that is exactly what he did: replaced the dead James with his brother. Wells and others have pointed out that Origen referenced “James, the brother of Jesus” three times as proof of how “wonderous” it was that even though Josephus did not accept Jesus as Christ he still reported how the “justice of James was not at all small.” So had the Testimonium been extent in Origen’s version of Antiquities, he certainly would have cited a far-more important reference to Jesus at least once.

“So too Paul speaks of James as his Lord’s brother. Surely the most obvious, straightforward, and compelling interpretation is the one held by every scholar of Galatians that, so far as I know, walks the planet. Paul is referring to Jesus’s own brother.” (151)

From John Dominic Crossan:

“Josephus’ phrase ‘inhabitants…who were strict in observance of the law’ probably means Pharisees. Was James a Pharisee? And, more important, how long had he been in Jerusalem? We know for sure, as seen earlier, that he was there by about 38 C.E., when Paul first met him. Did he come there only after the execution of Jesus, or had he been there long before it? I realize how tentative all this is, but much more explanation for James’s presence and standing in Jerusalem needs be given than is usually offered. Did he leave Nazareth long before and become both literate and involved within scribal circles in Jerusalem? Could his earlier presence there and Jesus’ (single?) visit to Jerusalem be somehow connected with this unit in John 7:3-5?… “If you do these things, show yourself to the world.”… All of that is terribly hypothetical, and I am quite well aware that it is. But we need to think much more about James and how he reached such status among Jewish circles that, on the one hand, he had to be executed by a Sadducee and that, on the other, his death could cause a High Priest to be deposed after only three months in office.” (Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography, 135)

Ehrman continues:

“And why is he Jesus’s twin? For Price it is because Thomas, better than any of the other disciples, has a true understanding of who Jesus is… The reality is that there was a tradition in some parts of the early church that Thomas really was the twin of Jesus. The Aramaic word Thomas, itself, means twin.” (151-152)

If this twinship is not something symbolic that later became reinterpreted as something literal, then how did something so weird become a tradition in the early church? If Thomas means “twin” proves the meaning is literal, then why doesn’t Mark say anything about it? Why doesn’t Mark list Thomas among Jesus’ brothers? Why does Thomas have no role whatsoever in the Synoptics? Was he originally supposed to be someone else’s twin? Is it just a coincidence that Thomas’ first name Judas matches the name of Jesus’ betrayer, who plays the symbolic role of the “evil twin”? In fact, the Gospel of Judas portrays “the thirteenth disciple” as the only follower of Jesus who had a “true understanding of who Jesus is” and that his role as “betrayer” was necessary to the grand scheme of things, very similar to plot of The Last Temptation of Christ. Cainite and Sethite Gnostics did the same thing to the stories in Genesis, showing how the “villains” of the Bible were actually the ones who had the true knowledge. If the twelve disciples were meant to symbolize different Jesus sects, then it would be easy to understand why Judas Thomas would represent a sect like the Cainites or Sethites and why Judas Iscariot would represent the Sicarii. After the mythological split, they were considered two different people.

“That Jesus and Thomas were identical twins plays a role in the Acts of Thomas… they think it’s Thomas since he does, after all, look exactly like… Thomas…. Jesus, more powerfully persuasive of course than his twin, wins the hearts of the newlyweds, who spend the night in conversation instead of conjugal embrace. This tale is predicated on the view that Thomas and Jesus really were twins in a physical, not symbolic or spiritual, sense.” (153)

Ehrman reads these things too literally. The couple sees Jesus as Thomas because it is the physical Thomas who has brought them towards the spiritual Jesus. If Thomas is Jesus’ literal twin, why does Jesus say, “I, Jesus, the son of Joseph the carpenter, acknowledge that I have sold my slave, Judas by name,” and why does Thomas say about Jesus: “he was called the son of Mary the virgin,” not “we are called the sons of Mary the virgin”? The connection is only between Jesus and Thomas. If Jesus and Thomas were literal twins, that would mean Thomas was also the Son of God.

“One wonders how the Christians who told such stories could possibly imagine that Jesus had a twin brother. Wasn’t his mother a virgin? Then where did the twin come from?” (153)

Yes, one does wonder how Christians would have this interpretation that is supposedly better than Price’s.

“We have several myths about divine men who were born of the union of a god and a mortal. In some of those stories the mortal woman is also impregnated by her husband, leading to the birth of twins (it is hard to know how they could be identical twins, but anatomy was not the strong suit of most ancient storytellers).” (153)

So Ehrman is citing a literal reading of Greek myth as proof for a literal reading of a Gnostic gospel? Well, I guess the only thing that all those “literalist” storytellers like the authors of the Acts of Thomas and the Greek myths have in common with all those mythicist interpreters of myth like Price is that neither of them are as smart as Bart Ehrman.

“…Price appeals to the nineteenth-century revolutionary leader in China, the so-called Taiping messiah named Hong Xiuquan, who called himself “the Little Brother of Jesus.”… Now we are really grasping at straws. A nineteenth-century man from China is evidence of what someone living in the 30s CE in Palestine thought about himself?… To use this case to clinch the argument is an enormous stretch, even by Price’s standards.” (154)

So Ehrman believes that Jesus’ brother, a Galilean peasant, moved to Jerusalem, became literate, taught a strict interpretation of Torah different than his brother’s, took the same role of a different James alongside Peter and John as one of the three main pillars of the church, became the leader of the Jerusalem church over Peter, and became so beloved in Pharisee–controlled Jerusalem that his death caused a riot, but an example of how religious leaders often claim spiritual titles of brotherhood is “grasping at straws.”

“This final view is not worked out as clearly as the other two. Sometimes, Price points out, a person named in the Bible embodies the characteristics of a larger group. And so in the book of Genesis the patriarch Jacob is renamed Israel, and in fact he becomes the father of the tribes of Israel; Ishmael is the father of the Ishmaellites; Benjamin represents the southern tribe of Israel, called Benjamin, and so forth. For Price, these are all fictional characters, and he claims that it could be similar with James.” (154)

So Ehrman thinks the twelve sons of Jacob were all historical also? Each of the twelve sons became the head of a new tribe? Does that mean he also thinks that Noah’s three sons traveled to different parts of the world and fathered the three main races?

“There are compelling reasons for thinking that the Dead Sea Scroll community had no direct ties to later Christian groups and for thinking that the historical James had no connections with the Dead Sea Scroll community, let alone that he was a high priest. What ancient sources ever say any such thing? None at all.” (155)

Is it a coincidence that both the Essenes and the author of Hebrews saw their Messiah as a reincarnation of Melchizedek, one of the most obscure characters in the Bible? Or that both Essenes and early Christians were heavily indebted to Enochian literature? There are plenty of non-mythicist scholars who connect John the Baptist to the Essenes.

“Paul quotes a passage of scripture… “Everyone who hangs on a tree is cursed.”… Centuries later, when Romans were executing the most heinous criminals and lowlifes by crucifying them, this verse was taken to be equally applicable. Obviously anyone who was killed in this way stood under God’s curse… But for the pre-Christian Paul it was quite clear: Jesus was not anything like God’s chosen one, the one selected to do his will on earth. Jesus did not enjoy God’s blessing: Just the opposite: he was under God’s curse. Evidence? He was hung on a tree.” (158)

That’s the age-old assumption inherent in the chronological bias of our Biblical canon: we assume that because the Gospels come first that the Gospels are being historical when they say Jesus was nailed to a cross and the Epistles are being metaphorical when they say Jesus was hung on a tree. But what if it was the other way around? What if the Talmud and the Toledot were correct and Yeshu being hung on a tree was historical and Jesus being nailed to a cross was metaphoric?

“That Jesus died by crucifixion is almost universally attested in our sources, early and late.” (163)

…if you leave out the Jewish tradition of Jesus being stoned to death.

“Who would make up the idea of a crucified messiah? No Jew that we know of.” (163)

As Richard Carrier told Ehrman in discussions on mythicism prior to the release of his book, the concept of a crucified messiah can be found in Daniel, which was referencing the death of Honi III, and the Melchizedek scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows an ancient interpretation that it is talking about the Messiah. So while it may be no Jew Ehrman “knows of,” there has definitely been one he has read of. Then there’s the Jeselsohn Stone of “Gabriel’s Vision,” called “the Dead Sea Scroll on stone,” found in 2008 which tells of a Messiah who will die and be resurrected after three days.

“Since no one would have made up the idea of a crucified messiah, Jesus must have really existed, must really have raised messianic expectations, and must have really been crucified. No Jew would have invented him.” (164).

I always find it amusing when theologians try and use the criterion of embarrassment on the central pillar of the religion that they have devoted their career to studying and have typically spent at least part of their life belonging to. “Only a crazy person would want to believe in a crucified Messiah!” said the Princeton Theology seminarian. It reminds me of the bishops in The Messenger who tell Joan of Arc that God must be crazy to have sent an illiterate peasant to deliver his message when that is exactly what their creed entails. The idea of a crucified Son of God was not new to the Jewish religion. Given that it is well accepted that the gospels have been heavily influenced by the lost wars against the Romans, the ancient religious symbolic trope of death and resurrection might not be as much of an anathema to all the Jews regardless of what the “stumbling block” verse may generalize about.

“As Hartman has argued—along with many, many other Hebrew Bible scholars—the reference to “an” (not “the”) anointed one in 9:26 “almost certainly” refers to another figure known from Jewish history, the high priest Onias III, who was deposed from being the high priest and murdered in 171 BCE…” (169)

And like Jesus, Onias III was a moderate beloved by both Jews and Greeks and was betrayed in a garden sanctuary. He is thought to have lived during the time of the Essene Teacher of Righteousness. His son escaped to Egypt and another Onias, Honi the Circle Drawer, a “righteous man” who lived during the time of Yeshu, commanded the weather, died a very Stoic death, and was raised from a “deep sleep” from beneath a tree after 70 years.

“This is the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be. Then where did the idea of a crucified messiah come from? It was not made up out of thin air… It is almost impossible to explain this claim—coming at this place, at this time, among this people—if there had not in fact been a Jesus who was crucified” (170)

Ehrman believes that anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him a great and powerful ruler over all Israel. But as Carrier points out: “the only kind of messiah figure you could invent would be one who wasn’t like that. Otherwise, everyone would notice no divine being had militarily liberated Israel and resurrected all the world’s dead… This means that if “someone made up a messiah” we can be absolutely certain he would look essentially just like Jesus Christ. A being no one noticed, who didn’t do anything publicly observable, yet still accomplished the messianic task, only spiritually (precisely the one way no one could produce any evidence against). In other words, a messiah whose accomplishments one could only “feel in one’s heart” (or see by revelation, as the Corinthian creed declares; or discover in scripture, as that same creed again declares, as well as Romans 16:25-26.”

“The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus—pagan, Christian, or Jewish—was fully convinced that he at least lived… It is also the view of Q and M and L and John and of all of John’s sources.” (171-172)

Taking hypothetical sources, especially saying sources, as witnesses to Jesus living is rather weak.

“And nowhere in any of these stories is there any hint that the author or his community has advanced its own interests in indicating Nazareth as Jesus’s hometown. In fact, just the opposite: the early Christians had to explain away the fact that Jesus came from Nazreth, as seen, for example, in John 1:45-46 and in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, which independently of one another try to show that even though Jesus came from Nazreth, he was born in Bethlehem.” (189)

Matthew and Luke are not trying to explain away Nazareth but rather conflate two contradicting traditions. With there being Nazarene sects, Christian connections to Nazarites, scriptural prophecies involving the Hebrew word netzer (“branch”), and the alternate gospel spellings of “Nazara,” it is easy to see how something like “Jesus the Nazarene” could be reinterpreted as “Jesus of Nazareth.”

“[Zindler] claims that Mark’s Gospel never states that Jesus came from Nazareth. This flies in the face, of course, of Mark I:9… but Zindler maintains that that verse was not originally part of Mark; it was inserted by a later scribe. Here again we see history being done according to convenience. If a text says precisely what you think it could not have said, then all you need to do is claim that originally it must have said something else.” (191).

Zindler actually says “It is of more than a little interest to learn that scholars suspect this verse to be a later addition just like the last twelve verses of the gospel.” Scholars who believe in a historical Jesus, not just mythicists like Zindler, think this because Matthew uses the same verse but with “Galilee” instead of “Nazareth” (Luke doesn’t have the verse at all). Also Mark 2:1 identifies Capernaum as Jesus’ home, and Matthew rectifies the contradiction by saying that Jesus moved his home from Nazareth to Capernaum. And it’s not like Ehrman is new to world of hypothetical interpolations.

“Salm emphasizes what scholars have long known: Nazareth is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in the writings of Josephus, or in the Talmud.” (193)

This is not just an argument from silence. Jack Finegan says: “In the Old Testament Jos. 19:10-15 gives a list of the towns of the tribe of Zebulon… but does not mention Nazareth. Josephus, who was responsible for military operations in this area in the Jewish War… gives the names of forty-five towns in Galilee, but does not say anything about Nazareth. The Talmud also, although it refers to sixty-three Galilean towns, does not mention Nazareth.” As Crossan says, “From Jewish literary texts, then, across almost one thousand five hundred years, nothing.” (Historical Jesus 15)

“Pottery shards connected to the house range from roughly 100 BCE to 100 CE (that is, the days of Jesus)…. Even though it existed, this is not the place someone would make up as the hometown of the messiah.” (197)

As opposed to all the other legendary places associated with the gospels for the purposes of pilgrimage?

“Again, I reiterate the main point of my chapter: even if Jesus did not come from Nazareth, so what? The historicity of Jesus does not depend on whether Nazareth existed. In fact, it is not even related to the question. The existence (or rather, nonexistence) of Nazareth is another mythicist irrelevancy. (197)

It is relevant to the question of the historical Jesus because historical evidence is largely based on a person’s relationship to other people and to places. In The Historical Jesus: Five Views, Price had problems arguing the mythicist perspective because he eschewed debating the Testimonium Flavian and focused mostly on proving the miracle stories were based on scripture. Of course most Biblical scholars don’t believe those are historical anyway, but a large number of them do believe Jesus came from Nazareth and that sets up a reason to believe in his historicity. It’s the seemingly arbitrary connections to people and places that best hold the evidence for whether someone is historical or mythical. If Bethlehem is based on theology and Nazareth is based on a misspelling, then maybe a historical Jesus just came from Capernaum, but it sets a pattern. The more explanations for seemingly arbitrary relationships such as living in one town or another, the more you strip away what can possibly be known about Jesus, and that in turn increases the chances that all information about him is mythical.

“The fact that a story about a person has been shaped according to the mold of older stories and tradition does not prove that the core of the story is unhistorical. It simply shows how the story came to take its shape. Take as an example the way the story of Jesus is told in the early chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. It has long been recognized that Matthew wants to portray Jesus as a “new Moses,” and so it is no surprise to find that the things that happen to Jesus in Matthew closely parallel the Old Testament traditions about Moses. Just as the ruler of the land, the Egyptian pharaoh, sought to destroy Moses as an infant (Exodus I), so too the ruler of the land, the Jewish king Herod, sought to kill the infant Jesus (Matthew 2). Jesus and his family escape by going to Egypt, the land of Moses… But the fact that Matthew shaped the story in this way has nothing to do with the question of whether or not Jesus existed.” (198-199)

This may be a rare instance in which I believe a gospel’s story element could be historical and Ehrman doesn’t. The Talmud and the Toledot says that Ben Perachiah escaped to Egypt with Yeshu during a purge of the Pharisees either by John Hyrcanus or Alexander Jannaeus. It is also known that Alexander Jannaeus switched allegiance from the Pharisees to the Saduccees during this time, so there actually could be an original story behind the “Escape to Egypt” from the first century B.C. It would be hard to understand why such a sparse detail would be lifted from Matthew, changed so drastically, and then retrojected into the past. It makes far more sense to me that Matthew took the legend of Yeshu and shaped it into a story symbolizing how many Jews fled Herod to Egypt in a “reverse Exodus” of first century A.D. It’s hardly proof that the story was not invented, but the first century B.C. is the best fit for the historical context.

“For instance, as in the story of the widow of Zarephath in I Kings 17, Price indicates that the story in which Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31) is drawn from I Kings 17:8-16, where Elijah provides miraculous quantities of food for the widow and her son in the time of famine. Unlike the earlier account I mentioned, however, here there are so many difference between the two episodes and so few similarities that it is hard to see how one was drawn from the other.” (200-201).

It is true some of the parallels that Price draws are too vague to confirm a literary connection.

“Is this explanation really at the same level of historical probability as the explanation of the triumphal entry? Zoroastrianism? Vohu Mana? Ahura Mazda? These were the influences that determined how the story of Jesus’ baptism were told?” (203)

Price is hardly the first to suggest a Zoroastrian influence on Judaism and Chistianity, starting with the original “savior messiah” Cyrus. Concepts such as Judgment Day and an ongoing spiritual struggle between angels and demons are basically Zoroastrian. The magi in Matthew are possibly Zoroastrian priests.

“Even if later storytellers chose to talk about Jesus’s baptism in light of something that once happened to Zoroaster—which seems highly unlikely, but if they actually did—this has no bearing on the question of whether Jesus existed and, in this case, very little bearing on the question of whether he really was baptized by John the Baptist.” (204)

New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson once wrote something to the effect that people should separate the “real Jesus” of Christian faith from the ethereal Jesus of “grown up history” such that among the very few things he could confidently assert is historical is his baptism under John and his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. It is one of the few events, backed by the criterion of embarrassment, that most Biblical scholars regardless of persuasion believe is historical. Identifying a likely literary trope that precedes it is of course entirely relevant to the question of whether it is possible Jesus’ baptism was invented to symbolize an influential figure in the church’s history and in turn whether a first century Jesus lived at all. If throwing doubt on one of the most historical-sounding elements of the gospel narrative isn’t relevant, then what does Ehrman believe are the legitimate boundaries for historical analysis?

“An analogy may yet again be useful. Today the historical novel is a widely accepted genre of literature. Over the past few years I have read Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, based on events in France during the Holocaust; A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, about the French Revolution; and Romola, by George Eliot, about Savonarola in fifteenth-century Florence… No one would claim that the French Revolution never happened because it is discussed in a work of fiction created by Charles Dickens or that the Holocaust was made up because there is a novel about it.” (207)

Ehrman’s subconscious must be in revolt to have come up with such an allegory. Mythicists are not trying to claim that the wars between the Romans and the Jews are fictional or that the first century A.D. never happened. They are trying to claim that the gospel Jesus is fictional, the functional equivalent of arguing that Sarah Starzynski, Charles Darnay, and Tito Melema from those books are fictional characters.

“Unfortunately, we do not have Mithraic texts that explain it all to us, let alone texts that indicate that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25 and that he died to atone for sins only to be raised on a Sunday.” (213)

While there are no Western inscriptions, a Seleucid temple in western Iran was dedicated around 200 B.C. to “Anahita, as the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithra.” And although the ceremonies of Mithraism were a secret, it is established that Mithras was equated with Sol Invictus, so it can probably be assumed that they celebrated on the general Roman holiday of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, “the birthday of the unconquered sun” on December 25th, not that they were the only ones celebrating the nearly universal holiday of the winter solstice.

“As I pointed out earlier, the reason a religion like Mithraism is called a mystery cult by scholars is that the followers of the religion were bound by a vow of secrecy and so never revealed the mysteries of their religion, either their practices or their beliefs. It is true that later writers sometimes indicated what, in their opinion, took place in the religion. But these later writers were not involved personally in the cult, and historians are highly reluctant to take them at their words as if they had real sources of information.” (213)

Just because a mystery cult tried to keep its rituals secret does not mean that information about it never got out.

“These later authors, such as the church father Tertullian, started making such claims for very specific reasons. It was not that they had done research and interviewed followers of those religions. It was because they wanted pagans to realize that Christianity was not all that different from what other pagans said and did in their religions so that there would be no grounds for singling out Christians and persecuting them.” (213-214)

So Tertullian was trying to compare his religion to “idolatry,” which was what he considered “The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment…”, and he did this so that he could stop the Roman persecution of Christians even though he believed that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”?

“The Christian sources that claim to know something about these mysteries, in other words, had a vested interest in making others think that the pagan religions were in many ways like Christianity. For that reason—plus the fact that they would not have had reliable sources of information—they generally cannot be trusted.” (214)

Justin Martyr’s excuse that the devils of paganism were so conniving that they copied the legendary elements of Jesus before Jesus was born has long been considered in mythicist circles to be one of the great epitomes of apologetic irrationality in the service of belittling the mystery religions, but Ehrman one-ups Justin by saying Justin is lying about parallel elements the saint clearly wishes weren’t there in order to make the two religions seem the same.

To be concluded…

After far too many years, finally a book has come out by a worthwhile Biblical scholar that attempts to address the Christ-Myth hypothesis that the gospels are actually a fictional narrative and that a first century Jesus did not actually exist. Bart Ehrman’s “Did Jesus Exist?” is credited as a “master explainer with deep knowledge of the field” who “methodically demolishes both the scholarly and popular “mythicist” arguments against he existence of Jesus” according to the jacket. Many other mythicist critics have taken up a retort to this book, but when I finally got a hold of it myself (thanks, Niels), I knew I had to go through it myself and show exactly how “deep” his knowledge really is. Although I consider myself a mythicist, I do believe there was a historical Jesus, though I believe he lived in the first century B.C. However, I usually very much enjoy reading books by Biblical scholars who argue for the first century Jesus and definitely believe they typically offer far better commentary on the origin of Christian literature. I also have another book of Ehrman’s, Lost Christianities, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I sometimes read things I disagree with but I typically find them to entirely reasonable nevertheless. Very rarely have I encountered even one “howler” that just completely misses the mark altogether. Not so with this book. Every page in this book is filled with errors, misconceptions, and straw men arguments. If it wasn’t for his characteristic tendency of lionizing Biblical scholars who pour over details with all-important linguistic “tools” unavailable to the amateur, it would be hard to believe the same person wrote this book. It definitely has the feel of a book being written quickly. Here is much of what he wrote:

“THERE is no need for me to give a comprehensive history of the claim that Jesus never existed. I will simply say a few words about some for he most important representatives… Some of the other mythicists I will mention throughout the study include Richard Carrier, who along with Price is the only mythicist to my knowledge with a graduate training in a relevant field (Ph.D. in classics from Columbia University)…” (14-19)

Despite his modesty, Ehrman does a decent job going over the history of mythicism. He even manages to remember Bruno Bauer. The only two people I would’ve liked to have added are the Swedish linguist Alvar Ellegard, who wrote Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ. and G. R. S. Mead. Ellegard also wrote A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship managed to identify the anonymous 18th-century political writer known by the pseudonym Junius as Sir Phillip Francis by electronically comparing the content of the letters to 230,000 words taken from known works.

“Eleusinian mysteries focused on the godman Dionysus (18, 22). [Not true. These mysteries were not about Dionysus but about the goddess Demeter.] (28)

Dionysus is the son of Demeter, and just as with other dying and rising gods like Dumuzi and Adonis, they were heavily associated with an older goddess figure. Sophocles names the god of the mysteries at Eleusis as both Bacchos (Dionysus) and Iacchos (called the “third Dionysus” by Nonnus) in Antigone. A song to Dionysus from Delphi describes Iacchos at Eleusis, where he “brings salvation.” During the festival, the first row of initiates swung tree branches called bacchoi and the second row were led by a torch-bearing priest named after Iacchos. There’s a whole category of Dionysian mysteries that ancient religion scholars are well aware of.

“Many early Christians rejected Mark’s Gospel as noncanonical (146). [Actually, Mark was everywhere accepted as canonical; in fact, every surviving Christian document that refers to it accepts it canonicity.] (29)

That’s not saying much since the earliest mention of a gospel comes from about 110 years after Jesus’ reported death, and even that is small amount and only from documents the surviving church sought to hold on to. The footnote explains that they are talking about how Papias was defensive about Mark not being an eyewitness and that the “Oracles of Matthew” was the most popular gospel at the time. Many scholars also question whether Papias’ Mark is the canonical Mark, but they take that for granted. Technically speaking, there wasn’t even a New Testament canon until about 180, so really their mistake is using the word “canonical” instead of “authentic” and thereby mistakenly implying an early canon, which is pretty much the exact opposite of underplaying Mark’s canonical status.

“The original version of Mark “did not include the resurrection at all” (156). [Not true. The original version of Mark does not have an episode in which Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection, but the text is completely unambiguous that Jesus had been raised from the dead. See example, Mark 16:6, which was an original part of the Gospel.] (29)

Let’s look at the full statement from the book: “The original version of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest account of the Jesus story, did not have the resurrection at all. This had been added later. Before these additions, Mark’s gospel ended with the women finding the empty tomb and only the intimation that Jesus had been resurrected as promised.” So is Ehrman’s complaint here that an “intimation” is “ambiguous”? No, he would have included the full quote in that case. This is the work of someone who is deliberately taking a statement out of context to score cheap points correcting mistakes that aren’t there.

“The Romans “completely destroyed the state of Judea in II2 CE” (178). [This is a bizarre claim. There was not even a war between Rome and Judea in 112 CE; there were no wars between Rome and Judea in II2; there were wars in 66-70 and 132-35 CE.]” (30)

Actually there were three wars, the second being the Kitom war, starting in 115 (close enough). The revolt broke out centered Lydda and spread out to recently conquered cities with large Jewish populations until Cyrene, Cyprus, Mesopotamia and Aegyptus joined in the revolt. Eusebius reports that Libya was depopulated to such an extent that new colonies had to be established within a few years. Gamaliel II died during the siege of Lydda.

“To begin with, there is no hard, physical evidence for Jesus (eighteen hundred years before photography was invented), including no archaeological evidence of any kind. This is not much of an argument against his existence, however, since there is no archaeological evidence for anyone else living in Palestine in Jesus’s day except for the very upper-crust elite aristocrats, how are occasionally mentioned in inscriptions (we have no other archaeological evidence even for any of these)… And absolutely no one thinks that Jesus was an upper-class aristocrat. So why would we have archaeological evidence of his existence?…” (42-43)

I don’t know any mythicist who has argued that there should be archaeological evidence for Jesus, but if he had marched into Jerusalem and tried to take over the Temple as all four gospels attest, the action would have been historically important enough to describe in War of the Jews, Philo and Justus of Tiberias.

“At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live… Moreover, it is an error to argue, as is sometimes done by one mythicist or another, that anyone as spectacular as Jesus allegedly was, who did so many miracles and fantastic deeds, would certainly have been discussed or at least mentioned in pagan sources if he really did exist. Surely anyone who could heal the sick, cast out demons, walk on water, feed the multitudes with only a few loaves, and raise the dead would be talked about! The reason this line of reasoning is in error is that we are not asking whether Jesus really did miracles and, if so, why they (and he) are not mentioned by pagan sources. We are asking whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed. Only after establishing that he did exist can we go on to ask if he did miracles.” (44)

I don’t know of any mythicists who believe that if Jesus was historical that he would be doing any miracles. As Ehrman points out later, they are mostly agnostics and atheists.

“What archaeological evidence do we have about Pilate’s rule in Palestine? We have some coins that were issued during his reign (one would not expect coins about Jesus since he didn’t issue any, and one—only one—fragmentary inscription discovered in Caesarea Maritima in 1961 that indicates that he was the Roman prefect. Nothing else… He certainly existed even though, like Jesus, we have no records from his day or writings from his hand… Think of an analogy. If a historian sixty years from now where to write up a history of the American South, in say, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is he likely to mention Zlatko Plese? (Zlatko is my brilliant colleague who teachers courses in ancient philosophy, Gnosticism, arieties of early Christianity, and other subjects.) Almost certainly not. What does that prove? Technically speaking, it proves nothing. But it does suggest that either Zlatko never existed or that he did not make a huge impact on the political, social, or cultural life of the South. As it turns out, Zlatko does exist (I bought him dinner last night)…” (44-45)

Is Ehrman being paid per word?

“If he is rarely mentioned, it is barely relevant to the question of his existence. It is possible that he simply made too little impact, just like the overwhelming mass of people who lived in the Roman Empire of the first century.” (46)

If Ehrmna believes the Testimonium is authentic, then it means Josephus considered the death of Jesus to be a “sad calamity” that “put the Jews into disorder,” comparable to two massacres he just listed. Jesus can’t be both highly irrelevant and a national tragedy.

“First, some (such as G. A. Wells) have maintained that if one moves the entire Testimonium from its larger context, the preceding paragraph and the one that follows flow together quite nicely.” (61)

It’s not just that.

“The pared-down version of Josephus—the one that others have thought was original, without the Chrsitian additions—contains very little that could have been used by the early Christian writes to defend Jesus and his followers from attacks by pagan intellectuals. It is a very neutral statement. The fact that Jesus is said to have been wise or to have done great deeds would not go far in the repertoire of the Christian apologists.” (62)

It isn’t neutral at all. He’s called “a wise man” and a “doer of starling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure.” This in a book of failed Messiahs that Josephus heaps nothing but scorn upon. Wells and others have pointed out that Origen referenced “James, the brother of Jesus” three times as proof of how “wondrous” it was that, even though Josephus did not accept Jesus as Christ, he still reported how the “justice of James was not at all small.”

“But it needs to be stressed that in the possibly original form of Testimonium there is not a word about Jesus being a messiah figure or even a political leader. He is simply a teacher with followers, accused on unknown grounds by (specifically) Jewish leaders and then executed.” (63)

But why? If Jesus had keep executed for causing a disturbance at the Jerusalem Temple, that would have been the most famous thing about him. Yet the Testimonium doesn’t even give a reason for his death. The writings of Josephus are long and descriptive, and in every other Jewish-Roman conflict, he elaborates on why the things that happen go about.

“Moreover, if one reads the passage without the rose-tinted lenses of the Christian tradition, its view of Jesus can be seen as basically negative” (63).

What?!? I would not believe Ehrman was familiar with the minimized Testimonium if he did not quote it himself in his book. Jesus is “a wise man” who teaches people “who receive the truth with pleasure,” who maintained followers both Jewish and Greek that “loved him” and “did not cease to do so” even after his execution . This is negative?!?

“The fact that he was opposed by the leaders of the Jewish people would no doubt have shown that he was not an upright Jew. And the fact that he was condemned to crucifixion, the most horrific execution imaginable to a Roman audience, speaks for itself. Even though Jesus may have been a good teacher, he was a threat to the state, or at least a nuisance, and so the state dealt with him fairly and strongly, by condemning him” (63).

Ehrman is basically describing what Josephus should have said if the minimized Testimonium were real. The fact that it does not has forced Ehrman to dismiss its obviously glowingly positive words as meaningless and instead he decides to accuse the atheist Earl Doherty of reading it with the “rose-tinted lenses of the Christian tradition.” This is pure projection. Ehrman must at least subconsciously realize that a negative reading of Josephus would help the “Christian tradition” and so is trying to get points for being neutral by claiming that an “unbiased” reading of Josephus has him praising the Pharisees and the Romans for “fairly” executing a wise, truthful, inclusive, and beloved teacher for no particular reason. Obviously, he feels forced to do this because he knows that Josephus normally would find a reason to defend both the Pharisees and the Romans.

“Doherty also objects to the idea that Josephus could call Jesus “wise” and one who appears to have taught the “truth.” If Josephus knew the teachings of Jesus—with which he surely would have vehemently disagreed—then he never could say such things. To this it can easily be objected on one hand that there is no reason for thinking that Josephus knew any of the things Jesus taught, and on the other that many of the things Jesus taught were in fact what many other famous teachers of Judaism taught: for example, that followers of God should love God above all else; that they should love their neighbors as themselves; that they should do good unto others; that they should feed the hungry and care for the poor and oppressed; and well, lots of other things that have seemed through the ages to Christian believer and unbeliever as both wise and true.” (63)

If Josephus knew nothing about Jesus’ teachings, then why would he call them wise and truthful? Wanting to defend both the Pharisees and the Romans, he would have simply assumed his teachings were the same as every other zealot he despises. What was Jesus, a Galilean peasant, doing with a large group of followers in Jerusalem, throwing out the merchants at the Temple? How could Josephus possibly justify such actions without some sort of authority that the Gospels claim Jesus completely refused to give: “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things” (Mark 11:33). But if that isn’t ridiculous enough, Ehrman opens up the other possibility that Josephus could have accepted Jesus’ teachings of love and universal brotherhood while at the same defended his execution!

“Those who wrote apocryphal stories about Jesus are flamboyant both in what they relate (recounting lots of Jesus’ miracles, for example) and in how they say it (stressing his divine nature, not simply that he was the messiah). The Testimonium is so restrained, with only a couple of fairly reserved sentences here and there, that it does not read like a Christian apocryphal account of Jesus written for the occasion.” (65)

Restrained? Even the minimized Testimonium includes mention of wondrous works. Apparently, Ehrman believes that all Christian interpolators would be unable to attempt a forgery of Josephus without recounting “lots of Jesus’ miracles” and not leave any possible doubt with the reader that Jesus is divine. My interpretation of the Testimonium is the exact opposite. I think there are two interpolators of Josephus here: one that did a very bad job of imitating Josephus’ attitude towards someone like Jesus (the minimized Testimonium) and another doing a mind-numbingly terrible job imitating Josephus’ attitude towards someone like Jesus (the full Testimonium).

“Recent estimates suggest that there were possibly up to a million Jews living in Palestine at any one time in the early first century… Josephus does not mention 99 percent of them—or rather, more than 99 percent. So why would he mention Jesus? You cannot say that he would have mentioned Jesus because anyone who did all those amazing miraculous deeds would surely be mentioned. As I pointed out earlier, the question of what Jesus actually did has to come after we establish that he lived, not before.” (66)

No, it should be argued at the same time. Ehrman seems to suggest that the most historically likely subject historians would comment on is Jesus’ miracles. Obviously, even if the historical Jesus did perform miracles, they were in front of his believers and not in the middle of the streets of Jerusalem. But Ehrman agrees with the gospels that Jesus was executed for causing a disturbance at the Jerusalem Temple, which obviously would have distinguished him from the other 99% of Palestinians. Yet Ehrman keeps trying to make the point that Jesus was no more historically remarkable than every other Galilean peasant who didn’t bring large crowds of people on a suicide mission. That is what Josephus should have talked about if he was describing a historical Jesus. Again, I don’t know any mythicists who argue his miracles should have been mentioned. I get the feeling that Ehrman is really talking to his literalist readers rather than the mythicists he is supposedly arguing against.

“In other references in the Talmud we learn that Jeus was a sorcerer who acquired black magic in Egypt. Recall the Gospel accounts of how Jesus fled his family to Egypt soon after his birth and his abilities later in life to perform miracles. He is said in the Talmud to have gathered five disciples and to have been hanged on the eve of Passover, after a herald proclaiming the charges of sorcery against him for forty days. Here again we may have a biased version of the Gospel accounts, where Jesus is killed during the Passover but with injudicious speed after a very quick trial, his execution occurring some twelve hours after his arrest.” (67)

Ehrman forgets to mention that Jesus is said to have lived in the first century B.C., was a student of Yehoshua ben Perachiah, that his mother was a hairfresser, that he was stoned to death, and then hung on a tree. Also, the account of him going to Egypt has a completely different context. These any many other details have nothing in common with the Gospels.

“The Talmudic references to Jesus were written hundreds of years after he would have lived and so are really of very little use for us in our quest.” (68)

This is typical of Christian studies scholars only accepting Greek-written writings of Jesus as “useful.” The writings about Jesus from his own people are deemed worthless and derivative without any explanation other than it is late. But in fact, Tertullian makes a reference to the story element about people stomping on cabbages on the way to see Jesus’ hung body proves that the story was in existence by the turn of the third century. The first Talmudic writings making reference to Jesus comes from the Mishnah, which was collected in the 200s, not long after the first references to Luke and John (Luke being the first gospel that is an unabashed attempt at history-writing). The names the Talmud gives for five disciples do not appear to be mythological constructions, at least not as much as “Twin, the twin of Jesus,” “Simon the Zealot” and “Judas Iscariot (the Sicarii).” In Mark 8:19-21, Jesus tells his disciples that five loaves fed five thousand with twelve left over and that seven loaves fed four thousand with seven left over, emphasizing the numerical symbolizism by asking them for the numbers and then telling them: “Do you not understand?” The five loaves are meant to symbolize the five disciples of Yeshu feeding five thousand in the Jerusalem church with their words, leaving twelve apostles left over. The seven loaves represent the seven evangelists who are denigrated as “table-waiters” in Acts 6:1-6 and who feed the four thousand Grecian Jews with their words, presumably leaving seven more evangelists in their place. One version of the Toledot also speaks of twelve men from the first century B.C. who wandered the “twelve kingdoms” of Israel and “spread false doctrines,” which when added to “the Twelve” from the gospels makes twenty-four, the same number of “prophets” who Jesus’ disciples say had “spoken in Israel” about Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. (Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar interprets “twenty-four prophets” to mean the number of books in the Jewish canon, but that would insinuate one prophet per book, which is not how the canon is set up.)

“These Talmudic references to Jesus were written hundreds of years after he would have lived and so are really little use for us in our quest. By the time they were set down, and every single Christian telling stories about Jesus naturally assumed that he had really existed as a historical person.” (68)

This leaves me to believe Ehrman has not actually read of the Talmudic writings since he obviously believes they confirm his first century A.D. dating.

“What [Luke] heard may have been right or it may have been wrong, but the fact that later Christians long after he was dead placed his book into the canon of the New Testament has nothing to do with it. Luke’s writings about Jesus carry no more or less weight than the writings of any other ancient biographer (Seutonius, for example, or Plutarch) –or, perhaps a more apt comparison, of any other biographer of a religious person, such as Philostratus and his account of Apollonius of Tyana.” (74)

Unlike Mark’s “folktale” and Matthew’s “romance,” Luke is writing an “epic history” rather than a story. But he is clearly working under the aegis of religious apologetics, which is different than both the history-writing of Seutonius or the story-writing of Plutarch. Simply comparing the Paul of Acts to the Paul of the epistles shows that Luke is purposely saying the exact opposite of what his sources are telling him, such as James and Cephas agreeing with Paul on the question of eating kosher foods when it is clear from Galatians that they did not. Luke’s biases are much larger, more particularized, more fantastical, and far, far more reactionary than other historians of his time. Historians like Seutonius, Plutarch and Philostratus were writing for a large and diverse audience while Luke was writing for one particular sect of a very unpopular religion. Luke’s readers almost by definition already agreed with him, so the author had far more creative control over explaining what “really” happened. Josephus may reiterate a few mythical stories as history, but gospel episodes like the apostles meeting with Simon Magus are obviously invented by Luke himself for theological purposes. In this way, I believe Luke is far more dishonest an author than Mark or Matthew. Like the Gospel of John, Luke shows a particular alliance to the Ephesus Presbyters (Acts 20:17-38), who are largely responsible for making the disbelief in the historical first century Jesus a heresy.

“These Gospels were probably written ten or fifteen years after Mark, and so by the year 80 or 85 we have at least three independent accounts of Jesus’ life (since the number of accounts of both Matthew and Luke re independent of Mark), all within a generation or so of Jesus himself, assuming he lived… Prior to the narrative leading up to Jesus’ death, most of the stories in John are found only in John, whereas John does not include most of the stories found in the other three Gospels” (76)

The likelihood of authenticity is increased when different sources from different backgrounds agree on the details of narrative, not when different sources from the same background disagree on the details of a narrative. Most scholars do not believe anything in John is historical and I do not remember Ehrman ever mentioning anything in John that he thought is.

“It is equally true of John’s account of Jesus’s death.” (76)

Where did this account of the Passion supposedly come from seeing how the disciples ran away upon his arrest? Did John get an interview with Pontius Pilate?

“The same can be said of the Gospel of Peter…” (77)

The Gospel of Peter is nothing except a Passion narrative, complete with a fictional courtroom of Jewish judges where Pilate and Herod presided over together! Crossan and Koester believe it was the original Passion source for the canonical gospels, and everyone else believes is completely derivative of the canonical gospels. In either case, it is not an independent account that Jesus lived. Also, a study by Crossan has shown that the original version of the Gospel of Peter had Jesus sentenced solely by the Sanhedrin and executed by the people rather than by Roman soldiers, matching the description of Jesus’ death in the Talmud and the Toledot.

“There are protracted debates among scholars about how much material from the life of Jesus this account originally contained.” (77)

Protracted debates about the historicity of a Passion narrative– from an apocryphal gospel– that none of Jesus’ disciples witnessed? Where?

“Another independent account occurs in the highly fragmentary text called Papyrus Egerton 2. Here again it is difficult to know how extensive the full Gospel contained in these partial remains originally was; what survives are four episodes from the life of Jesus, one of which has no parallel in the Gospels of the New Testament or in any other known Gospel. Here then, at least in the nonparalleled story, but probably in all four, is a seventh independent account.” (77)

So because of three garbled sentences about one unreadable miracle on the Jordan River, we have another “independent account”? Why not count the other two versions of Mark that have a different ending? Why not count the version of Luke that has Jesus crying tears of blood and the version of John with the story of Jesus helping the prostitute? It seems any tiny spelling variation of a Greek gospel could warrant an “independent account.” Yet the Talmudic references, which show far more variability in content not derived from the Greek tradition, is dismissed out of hand. The Toeldot Yeshu is not even mentioned. Those are too “late” to be historically worthy, so their traditions are derivative on the gospels even though most of the details show no similarity at all to the gospel tradition.

“But if we restrict ourselves here, as we did earlier, to a hundred years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death, we have at least seven independent accounts, some of them quite extensive.” (78).

The dating of the gospels are based mostly on the assumption that Jesus lived when the gospels say he lived, so it is somewhat circular logic to assume the canonical gospels are more trustworthy than other material like the Talmud or the Toledot based on a first century dating that is not based on outside evidence. There is actually some good evidence all four gospels should be dated to the second century, such as the lack of synagogues and Bible-beating Pharisees in the small towns of Galilee until after the Bar Kochba Revolt. The second century Rabbi Jonathan, when questioned about healing on the Sabbath, is quoted as saying: “For it is holy unto you, I.e., [the Sabbath] is committed to your hands, not you to its hands.” (Mark 2:27). So it appears the gospels (as we have them) could be retrojecting the second century into the first century. Admittedly, there is a lot in Mark that seems to suggest it was written during or shortly after the First Jewish-Roman war in 70 A.D., but a lot of those verses could equally be attributed to the next two wars in the second century. The parts of the gospel narrative that point to the first century, such as John the Baptist, Pontius Pilate, the names of the twelve disciples and the curtain of the Temple ripping, could have come from earlier sources than the canonical gospels or were simply meant as callback to the First Jewish-Roman war in order to parallel one of the more current wars in the second century.

“We cannot think of the early Christian Gospels as going back to a solitary source that “invented” the idea that there was a man Jesus. The view that Jesus existed is found in multiple independent sources that must have been circulating throughout various regions of the Roman Empire in the decades before the Gospels that survive were produced.” (82)

Just because some gospels have different stories than other Gospels does not mean that the entire “Gospel as biography” genre must have been re-created from scratch in every instance. As Ehrman himself says just a little bit later: “And some stories were made up in the process, developed to speak to the needs the Christian communities and to address the situations they found themselves in” (84). Why then, could the gospel genre not have been invented for exactly that same reason?

“Yet many of them, independent though they be, agree on many of the basic aspects of Jesus’s life and death: he was a Jewish teacher of Palestine who was crucified on order of Pontius Pilate, for example.” (86)

There are also different accounts that claim Zoroaster lived, but they disagree by as much as 5,000 years. Is Ehrman just as sure that Zoroaster was a historical person? Is every version of the King Arthur story also an “independent account” that Arthur lived and was a king? John the Baptist and Pontius Pilate were famous figures who could easily have been added to the gospel narrative to symbolize the beginning and ending of the Jewish Messianic movement from baptism to defeat to “resurrection.” The story of Jesus changing water to wine parallels the structure of the gospel, beginning with a baptism by John, a stand-in for their Essene origin, and a Eucharist, signifying his death under Pilate, a stand-in for the Roman power. In contrast, the connections Yeshu has between Yehoshua ben Perachiah and Shimeon ben Shetach in the Jewish tradition, are more arbitrary and therefore more realistic in my opinion.

“These oral traditions had been in circulation for a very long time before they came to be written down. This is not pure speculation. Aspects of the surviving stories of Jesus found in the written Gospels, themselves based on earlier written accounts, show clearly both that they were based on oral traditions (as Luke himself indicates) and that these traditions had been around for a very long time—in fact, that they had been around since Christianity first emerged as a religion in Palestine itself.” (86).

Many of the gospel stories and teachings do appear to have come from oral tradition, but for how long is hard to tell. The biographical details, however, such as where Jesus was born (Nazareth of Bethlehem?), when Jesus was born (4 B.C. or 6 A.D.?), and to how many parents (Joseph and Mary or just Mary?) are too varied to be historically reliable. Some of the details appear to be based on theological reasons: a prophecy about Bethlehem, the census as a symbol of Roman dominion, etc.

“In several passages in the Gospels a key word of phrase has been left in the original Aramaic, and the author, writing in Greek, has had to translate it for his audience.” (87)

Knowing a phrase in Aramaic hardly proves that it was originally written in that language. Time and time again, various scholars have embarked on the crusade to find the Holy Grail of an early Aramaic Proto-gospel, yet they have been repeatedly struck down time and time again and have never gone much further than identifying a few Semitisms in Q. If the core of the Gospels is the Greek Cynicism of the wisdom sayings, then it is perhaps time to consider the possibility of a Hellenistic origin.

“Mark is not the only Gospel where this occurs… They approach him and say to him “Rabbi,” an Aramaic word that the author translates “which means, ‘Teacher.’” (88)

Is Ehrman insinuating that the story in John was originally written in Aramaic because it translates the word “Rabbi”? The first person to called Rabbi in the Talmud is Gamaliel the Elder, who lived 20 years after Jesus died. The term was not used to mean a common teacher until the advent of the synagogue, which archaeology suggests was no built en masse until after the Bar Kochba Revolt.

“There is very little dispute that some of the Gospel stories originated in Aramaic and that therefore they go back to the earliest stages of the Christian movement in Palestine.” (88)

I don’t think so. Every Biblical scholar I’ve read treats the idea like something from the past.

“AT THE OUTSET I should emphatically state the obvious. Every single source that mentions Jesus up until the eighteenth century assumed that he actually existed. That is true no matter what period you choose to examine: the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Late Antiquiuty, and before. It is true of every author of every kind, Christian, Jewish, or pagan… The idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion. It has no ancient precedents. It was made up in the eighteenth century. One mnight well call it a modern myth, the myth of the mythical Jesus.” (96).

The Talmud and the Toledot say Jesus lived during the first century B.C. If we look past primary sources and include references to people who reportedly did not believe in a historical Jesus, there are also the Gnostic “anti-Christs” in 2 Peter and 2 John who were always “refusing to acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in human nature” and claiming the gospels were “cleverly invented myths.” Justin’s Trypho says: “if he has indeed been born and exists anywhere—is unknown…” Mara Bar Serapion dated the “wise king” who was executed by the Jews (not the Romans) as happeneing immediately before the Hasmonian kingdom fell. Epiphanius also accidentally endorsed a legend that Jesus was crowned king after Alexander Jannaeus. There are also the Docetics, who believed Jesus had not been born but rather had come down in the spirit and did not have a physical body and who were, as I see it, responsible for the parts in Luke and John where Jesus manages to escape the crowds by moving directly through them. The Manicheans also did not accept that Jesus had a physical body. The Cathars held a similar belief up until Albingesian Crusade. The 12th century Spanish philosopher, physician, and historian, Abraham ben Daud also recorded in his “The Jewish history-writers say that Joshua ben Perachiah was the teacher of Yeshu ha-Notzri, according to which the latter lived in the day of King Janni…”, as recorded in Dr. Adolph Neubauer’s Medieval Jewish Chronicles from 1887.

“What I did not stress earlier but need to point out now is that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that the pagan Tacitus or the Jewish Josephus acquired their information about Jesus by reading the Gospels. Indirectly, then, Tacitus and (possibly) Josephus provide independent attestation to Jesus’s existence from outside the Gospels although, as I stated earlier, in doing so they do not give us information that is unavailable in our other sources.” (97)

Tacitus mistakenly refers to Pilate as a procurator, a title that only came into use after the year 44, and the same mistake as the gospels. The sources from the gospels all come from the same Christian background so obviously the views of Josephus and Tacitus are more important than yet another version of the gospel which we well know there must have been hundreds of. Had Tacitus called Pilate by his rightful title rather than the title used by the gospel tradition, it would prove that he received his information from a source independent of the gospel narrative, and would be have been strong evidence for a first century Jesus.

“Papias may pass on some legendary traditions about Jesus, but he is quite specific—and there is no reason to think he is telling a bald-faced lie—that he knows people who knew the apostles (or the apostles’ companions). This is not eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus, but it is getting very close to that.” (101).

Ehrman himself points out that Papias lived in the second century and wrote his book some time between 120 and 130. Assuming the average scholarly dating for the Pauline epistles, that means that he would have been talking to apostles such as Paul or Apollos 70 to 80 years after their prime. Disciples of Jesus would have to have been living 90 to 100 years after Jesus died. Hence, even with Irenaeus moving Jesus’ death to the 50s A.D., the Apostolic tradition still needed to paint John as a young man during the time of Jesus and an extremely old man when he supposedly taught Papias and Polycarp, who then relayed the Apostolic canon and tradition to Irenaeus so that he could write about it around 180. That’s 150 years for only two degrees of separation.

“The ones I am most interested in here, however are those that oppose Christians who insisted that Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human. These opponents of Ignatius were not ancient equivalents of our modern-day mythicists. They certainly did not believe that Jesus had been made up or invented based on the dying and rising gods supposedly worshipped in this world and delivered inspired teachings. But he was God on earth, not made of flesh as the rest of us.” (102)

We do not have the actual writings of any Docetics so as to be completely sure how grounded in history their angelic Savior was, but one thing Docetics and mythicists definitely had in common is their belief that Jesus was not “born of woman.” If 2 Peter was written against the Docetics as some have argued, then they definitely did believe that those who believed in a historical Jesus did “follow cleverly devised myths” (1:16). 2 John is written against the same “anti-christs.”

“First from a letter that Ignatius wrote… For you are fully convinced about our Lord, that he was truly from the family of David according to the flesh, Son of God according to the will and power of God, truly born from a virgin, and baptized by John that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him. In the time of Pontius Pilate and the tetrarch Herod, he was truly nailed for us in the flesh… Ignatius, then, provides us yet with another independent witness to the life of Jesus.” (102-103).

Just as with 2 Peter and 2 John, the fact that the epistles of Ignatius are so aggressively reactionary proves that there was an ancient belief that Jesus was not from David, not baptized by John, and not killed by Pontius Pilate. The author would hardly need to forcefully pound in that Jesus “truly” baptized by John and crucified during the time of Pontius Pilate and the tetrarch if the only point of conflict between him and his detractors was whether Jesus had a physical body or not. (Notice that it is not “under Pilate” but “In the time of Pontius Pilate and the tetrarch Herod,” indicating that perhaps Ignatius knows only the Gospel of Peter’s Passion narrative of Jesus being judged by both Pilate and Herod.) A real independent witness would not just defend the status quo of the literal interpretation of the gospel narrative but add secondary knowledge: something like the location of where Mary or some of the disciples are buried. It would only make sense to someone trying to provide compelling evidence for the historicity of Jesus.

“The letter of I Clement… His sufferings were “before your eyes” (2.1)… The blood of Christ is precious to the Father, poured out for salvation (7.4)… The blood of the Lord brought redemption (12.7)… Jesus came from Jacob “according to the flesh” (32.2)… Everyone knew he existed.” (104-105).

If everyone knew he existed, that reality would be evident from detailed post-gospel events about Jesus’ family and disciples, not vague theological declarations against supposedly non-existent arguments on whether or not Jesus was born “according to the flesh.” Clement fails even to identify the name of Jesus’ mother despite his obvious desire to convince the reader that Jesus was a historical person. Since Clement obviously was not writing to direct witnesses of the crucifixion, it can safely be presumed that the sufferings “before your eyes” were metaphorical. And blood being “poured for salvation” and “redemption” does not prove anything about a historical Jesus.

“There are reasons for thinking that at the heart of both stories is a historical tradition: independently they confirm that a field in Jerusalem was connected in some way both with the oney Judas was paid to betray Jesus and with Judas’s death. Moreover, it was known as the Field of Blood“ (108)

If Ehrman hadn’t summarily dismissed the Jewish tradition of Jesus without even reading it, he would know that the Toledot identifies Judas as a gardener and that it was in his field where Jesus was hung on a vegetable stalk after being stoned to death in the first century B.C. Judas then stole the body (which is probably related to what Matthew was referring to when he spoke of a “rumor” that the disciples stole the body) and hid it in his own garden. There is also another parallel in John where Mary Magdalene mistakes the gardener for Jesus, which appears to be connected to the fact that the gardener Judas is the “twin” of Jesus, confirming that he is mythologically equivalent to Judas Thomas. Since it is well known that there is a Gnostic tradition in which Judas is crucified in place of Jesus, we can see how the garden might have also become connected to Judas’ own death on a tree takes the place of the older legend of Jesus being hung on a tree, his suicide symbolizing how the actions of the Zealots and Sicarii in Jerusalem ultimately brought about their own deaths and the destruction of Jerusalem.

“Moreover, that Luke has access to sayings of the historical Jesus not recorded otherwise, even in his Gospel, is clear from a passage as Acts 20:35, where the apostle Paul is recorded as saying, “I have shown you that it is necessary be hard work to help the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that he said ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive.’”… Whether Paul himself really knew this saying of Jesus can be argued. But what is clear is that Luke thinks he knew it, and, more importantly for our considerations, that it is a tradition of a saying of Jesus that has no parallel in any of our Gospels. And so the book of Acts provides further evidence from outside the Gospels that Christians from earliest times believed that Jesus actually lived, as a Jew, that he was a moral teacher, and that he was killed in Jerusalem after being betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas.” (108-109).

How is a second work by one of the evangelists “further proof” of anything? Acts 20:35 could easily be a poetic reference to Luke 6:34: “If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you?” or 18:22: “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” Even if it was a unique tradition, there are plenty of unique traditions from Luke. What would it matter whether he placed it in his gospel or put it in the mouth of Paul in Acts?

“But the speeches in Acts are particularly notable because… it shows that Acts is not simply a document from the 80s CE.” (109)

What evidence is there that Luke predates Marcion’s gospel in the 130s or even that it existed before the 170s? Luke says that while Jesus speaking in a synagogue in Nazareth, he makes a reference to healings in Capernaum in 4:23 before actually going there in 4:31, a strange editorial mistake that makes it was appear the story was originally meant for a later part of the gospel. Tertullian, in Against Marcion 4.7, quotes the beginning of Marcion’s gospel as a composite of Luke 3:1a and 4:31, proving that Marcion’s gospel began with Jesus in Capernaum before Nazareth. This indicates that Marcion’s version was closer to the original.

“That the speeches of Acts contain very ancient material, much earlier than the Gospels, is significant as well because these speeches are completely unambiguous that Jesus was a mortal who lived on earth and was crucified under Pontius Pilate at Jewish insistence. Consider the following extracts from three of the significant speeches” (112)

What evidence is there that these speeches were written long before the Gospels? Acts 13 appears to be the beginning of a source focusing on the “prophets and teachers” (not apostles) of Antioch, including “Saul” (It’s the Ephesus tradition that renamed him “Paul”). Luke refers to Antioch 14 times and says that it is the first place where people started calling themselves Christian (11:26). The Epistle to the Galatians refers to Peter going to Antioch and the Gospel of Matthew, which sets up Peter as the “cornerstone” of the Church has also been linked to Antioch by several story elements including the amount of a certain tax that’s mentioned. This also seems to fit with Luke’s sources since the first speech is attributed to Peter and both Luke and John have a special affinity with Peter despite the fact that John is the predominate apostle in the Ephesus tradition. Luke dedicates his gospel to a Theophilus and there was a Theophilus who became the Patriarch of Antioch in 169, who also happens to have written about the etymology of the name Christian, which curiously enough, is not named after Jesus but “because we are anointed with the oil of God” (emphasis mine). Polycarp is also known to have been in communication with Ignatius of Antioch. The “we” passages which are connected to the ship faring adventures of Paul in the second half of Acts would more likely to have come from a Pauline sect of Christianity hostile to Judaism, an adequate description of the Marcion sect. Thus, the sources of Acts point largely to its composition in the second century.

“Among the writings that circulated under the name of Paul are a number that Paul did not actually write. One of them is the letter of I Timothy, which records the tradition known from so many of our other sources: “I command you before the God who makes all things alive and Christ Jesus, the one who, bearing his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession…” (113-114)

1 Timothy does not show up until Irenaeus’ canon from 180, along with 2 Peter and 2 John, which as we have already established, were written specifically to contradict the “non-existent” idea that Jesus was a myth.

“Peter too probably did not write either book that bears his name in the New Testament… For you were called to this end, because Christ suffered for you, leaving an example for you that you might follow in his steps, who did not commit sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth, who when reviled did not revile in return, while suffering uttered no threat, but trusted the one who judges righteously, who bore out sins in his body on the tree, in order that dying to sin we might live to righteousness, for by his wounds we were healed (3:21-24).”… Once again we have independent testimony to the life (in the flesh) of Jesus and his very tangible death” (114)

Ehrman obviously has not read very much material from any mythicists since he does not seem to understand that Jesus being hung on a tree, just like Adonis and Yeshu, is a central argument of the mythicists. Apparently he thinks he can easily make a point just by running through the Bible and finding any reference to Jesus’ death whether it’s on a Roman cross or not.

“Even the book of Revelation, with all its bizarre imagery and fantastic apocalyptic views, understands that Jesus was a real historical figure. For this author he was one who “lived” and who “died” (1:18).” (115-116)

So he “lived” and “died”… as opposed to “dying and rising” gods?!? Again, Ehrman does not seem to understand what he is arguing against. Let’s look at that verse he mentioned: “I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.” If this verse is proof of Jesus as a historical first century peasant, what exactly would Ehrman consider to be proof of an originally divine “dying and rising” god?

“As my final example I can turn to the letter of the Hebrews… He was descended from the tribe of Judah (7:14)”… He suffered “outside the gate” (that is, outside Jerusalem; 13:12)” (116-117).

After over 100 pages, Ehrman has finally made a decent point. Doherty has argued that the Jesus of Hebrews is mythical, saying that being descended from Judah is based on Psalm 110 and that “outside the gate” refers to the Levitical lamb being sacrificed “outside the camp” modeled after Exodus. I disagree with that assessment. Nevertheless, since this book is supposedly a reaction against mythicists, it would have been nice for Ehrman had included that interpretation himself instead of implicitly assuming there are no mythicist arguments for it. In my opinion the Epistles to the Hebrews was written by the same Proto-Orthodox group in Antioch who did know the gospel narrative and were responsible for rewriting the “Pauline” epistles of Marcion so that they included very Hellenistic interpretations of the Old Testament.

“First, Paul indicates unequivocally that Jesus really was born, as a human, and that in his human existence he was a Jew. This he states in Galatians 4:4: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born from a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law…” (119)

Dying and rising gods were typically demi-gods born from a human woman and hung on a tree. The author of Galatians could have taken a story about Yeshu being born without a father and hung on a tree and applied those parallel motifs to the standard dying and rising god myth. Christian studies scholars very often have a hard time appreciating how radical it would have been to nominate a recently living peasant for being one with the Godhead, even in a Hellenistic Jewish culture. Caesar Augustus himself got criticized for taking divine titles during his lifetime. Crossan makes a good attempt at explaining this elevation of early Christianity as an ironic (satiric?) reaction to Augustus’ titles implying divine right by conquest by bestowing the same titles on Jesus by the divine right of peace, a compelling idea that nevertheless has little scriptural evidence to back it up. More common in Jewish religion were abstract spiritual concepts such as the Enochian Son of Man or the Greek Logos. Combining such ideas with a vague myth from over a century ago would be a lot less problematic than identifying it with a recent teacher. And had the author of Galatians been even somewhat familiar with the gospel Jesus, he surely would have mentioned his mother Mary or his “disciples” (a word he never uses). Instead, Cephas and James are only “apostles,” no better connected to Jesus than him.

“This statement also indicates that Jesus’ mission was to Jews, a point borne out in another letter of Paul’s, in Romans 15:8: “For I say that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show the truthfulness of God, in order to confirm that promises given to the patraichs.” (119).

Neither of those verses speaks of any mission. The redemption Jesus gave was through his death, not his teachings, as anyone familiar with the Pauline epistles can explain. The grammar of the passage in Romans is temporally ambiguous. NRSV translates the passage: “Christ has become a servant of the circumcised”, meaning this is probably referring to another vision, just as in 1 Cor. 9:1: “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” Being a “servant to the circumcised” does not quite exemplify his missionary work in the gospels.

“…the phrase Jesus Christ, which means “Jesus the messiah” (since the Greek word Christ is a literal translation of the Hebrew word messiah)…” (119).

As if his complete disregard for any arguments made by actual mythicists had not already proved Ehrman is not writing this book as part of any honest discussion on the topic, this sentence pretty much nails it in the head that it is just meant as a hit job to sell books to Bible illiterates who haven’t even figured out that Christ and Messiah are the same thing.

“Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” It should not be thought here that Paul is referring to “brothers of the Lord” in some kind of spiritual sense, in that in Christ all men are brothers. If that were what he meant, then the rest of the statement would make no sense because it would mean that the apostles themselves and even Cephas (Peter) were not the “spritual brothers” of the Lord since they are differentiated from those who are brothers.” And so interpreters are virtually unified in thinking that Paul means Jesus’ actual brothers (120).

The differentiation is that the apostles and Cephas are itinerant “messengers” who traveled and that the “brother of the Lord” is the spiritual leader of the Jerusalem Church. Had James been an actual physical brother of Jesus, or Cephas been an actual disciple of Jesus, then it would be unthinkable that the author could so boastfully dismiss their opinions and equate his authority as equal to theirs as he does in Galatians, at least not without explaining himself. Even someone getting his information from visions would have a hard time telling Jesus’ own disciples what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And why would he know the name of Jesus’ brother but not his mother? If the “brothers of the Lord” was a euphemism for spiritual brotherhood, or if they were descendants of Yeshu, then it could easily be seen how he was able to dismiss James so lightly.

“We know the names of some of Jesus’s brothers from our early Gospel traditions. The Gospel of Mark names them as James, Joses, Judas, and Simon (6:3). It also indicates that Jesus had sisters, though these are not named.” (120)

The verse referring to those names of Jesus’ brothers is not exactly a completely arbitrary biographical detail given for the sake of the reader’s knowledge. Had that been the author’s intention, it would say something like: “Jesus’ family lived in Nazareth: his brothers were James, Joses, Simon and Judas, and his sisters were Salome and Ruth.” Instead, the names are given as part of the story. His own hometown takes offense to him, asking, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And so Jesus declares that prophets have no honor in their hometown. Given the context, we might consider a symbolic interpretation in which Jesus is not accepted among his own people because they already had figures like him with those names. In fact, the names of Jesus’ brothers do reflect famous Jews from first century Galilee. Judas the Galiliean was a zealot, and his “sons” (or disciples) were James and Simon. Joses the Galilean was a famous rainmaking sage who could control the weather, much like Jesus and Honi the Circle Drawer. The reason Jesus’ sisters have no names can be explained by the fact that there were no famous women personages in Galilean history during this time. Luke uses the same symbolism in his version of the story, but makes a stronger emphasis on the present fact that the Jews had not accepted Jesus as the Messiah.

“As it turned out, in one place Paul also names one of the brothers of Jesus, and it is none other than James, also mentioned by Mark” (120).

But Galatians also refers to “James, Cephas, and John,” which one can only presume is supposed to refer to the same big three disciples in the gospels: Peter, James and John. If James is the brother of Jesus, how can he also be James, son of Zebedee? And why is James the leader of the Jerusalem church and not Peter? Acts only confuses things more by having James the leader of the Jerusalem chruch get killed and then presumably another James appears as leader of the Jerusalem church without any explanation!

“The fact that Paul speaks of “the twelve” as having seen Jesus at the resurrection means either that he does not know the stories about Judas (as was probably true of Mark and John as well) or, as I have suggeseted, that the name “the twelve” was attached to this group as a group, even when one of them was no longer with them.” (121)

If Paul really spoke to the brother of Jesus, shouldn’t he know everything about Judas?

“What this means, then, is that Paul believes that it was the Jews (or Judeans) who were ultimately responsible for killing Jesus, a view shared by the writers of the Gospels as well, even though it does not sit well with those of us today who are outraged by the wicked use to which such views were put in the history of anti-Semitism… He never mentions Pontius Pilate or the Romans, but he may have had no need to do so. His readers knew full well what he was talking about. Crucifixion was the form of punishment used by the Romans and could be used on criminals sentenced by Roman authorities.” (124-125).

Again, Ehrman does not even seem to be aware that the word for “crucifixion” is the same for “staked” as in “staked to a tree.” This is one of the central pillars of the mythicist argument yet he shows know knowledge of it.

“G. A. Wells argues that what we have here in Paul is not a quotation of the historical Jesus but a prophecy from heaven that came to a Chrsitain prophet, which Paul understood, then, as having come “from the Lord.” (126)

Hey, Ehrman finally brought up a second argument from a mythicist in his book about mythicists.

“It looks exceedingly likely that Paul is basing his exhortation on a tradition about divorce that he knows—or thinks he knows—going back to the historical Jesus… we have close parallels beween what Paul says Jesus said (in a quotation or a paraphrase) and what Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having actually said.” (127)

Marriage was actually rather rare among the ancient Jesus movements. The Marcionites did not marry. The Cerinthians did not marry. The Montanists did not marry. The Nicolaitans, the Gnostics of Asia Minor and the Carpocratians were all said to have ruled out having children although they did have intercourse, according to Epiphanius. Even the formerly “Proto-Orthodox” Tatian, who combined the four canonical gospels into a super-gospel, became a “heretic” over a religious disagreement over whether marriage was permitted, a split that made him leader of many ascetic “Encratites” in Syria. Papias’ Ephesus church in Asia Minor appears to have been bucked tradition by not just allowing marriage but only allowing married men to become “elders.” Yet even an apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla from a dissident in that same church makes the claim that Paul preached complete asceticism as the only means of converting. That dissident was defrocked for it, according to Tertullian. Most of the other sects are known to have used different versions of the gospels, and the ascentic Marcionites had a shorter version of the Pauline Epistles. Did all of them edit out that part Jesus and Paul said about marriage?

“He is writing these letters to deal with problems that had arisen in [his churches]. His letters are not meant to spell out everything that he knew or thought about God, Christ, the Spirit, the church, the human condition, and so forth. He addressed problems that his churches were facing. I myself have written hundreds of lketters dealing with religious issues over the past thirty-five years. It would be, oh, so easy to collect seven of these letters and not find a single saying of Jesus quoted or a single reference to anything he is thought to have done or experienced” (129-130).

It is true that most letters would not expound on these things. That is one of the reasons I think even the primary Pauline epistles are fake, because in fact, the Pauline epistles DO spell out tons of things about God, Christ, the Spirit, the church, the human condition, and things that one would have expected him to have already explained to his readers. It is because Paul does not say everything he should say if he had something like the gospel narrative in mind that it feels “incomplete” to those who read the gospels first.

“I should stress that the Pauline scholars who have devoted many years of their lives to studying Romans and Galatians and I Corinthians are not the ones who argue that Paul never mentioned the details of Jesus’s life—that he as born of a woman, as a Jew, and a descendant of David; that he ministered to Jews, had a last meal at night, and delivered several important teachings. It is only the mythicists, who have a vested interest in claiming that Paul did not know of a historical Jesus, who insist that these passages were not originally in Paul’s writings. One always needs to consider the source.” (133)

So people who devote their lives to Jesus and the Bible do not have any vested interest a historical Jesus? Ehrman admits to once being an evangelical that took a literalist approach to the Bible. So was the Biblical scholar and theologian Robert Price, who also says he thought the idea was crazy until he really started looking into it.

“As I earlier mentioned, the author of 1, 2, and 3 John was living in the same community out of which the Gospel of John was produced, and he shows clear evidence of actually knowing John’s Gospel. And how many times does he quote it in his three letters? None at all.” (137-138)

John’s epistles are very short (supposedly to “save ink”) and there’s no way to know if the epistles didn’t come before the Gospel. Also, it’s possible the author of 2 John would just be quoting himself.

“How often does he talk about Jesus’s parables, his miracles, his exorcisms, his trip to Jerusalem, his trial before Pilate? Never. Does that mean he doesn’t think Jesus lived?” (138)

The first two Johannine epistles were written only to “prove” that the gospel Jesus had come in the “flesh” and was therefore a historical person. None of the parables, miracles, etc., needed to be repeated because it was already assumed the reader was familiar with the gospel narrative that the author intended to validate. The third epistle appears to have only been written to give authority to a presbyter named Diotrephes.

“So too with the book of Acts.” (138)

Since the author of Acts already included Jesus’ sayings in his gospel, which he assumed had already been read, repeating those sayings would be redundant. Yet despite this redundancy, Luke actually does have Peter explain “how God anointed Jesus of Nazereth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem” (10:38). This is the point that the Pauline epistles never make: that a historical Jesus had lived and had conducted an itinerant ministry recently. Notice that Luke emphasizes the fact that Peter claims to have witnessed the acts directly, a point he would hardly had to justify to the reader since it was already assumed, yet he needed to make the point clear to counteract the “anti-christs” in 2 Peter who said the stories of Jesus were “myths.”

“The authors of I Clement (from around 95 CE) and the Epistle of Barnabas (around 135 CE) show clear and compelling evidence that they know about Jesus and understand that he was a real historical figure. They say a number of things about him. But their silences are nearly as large as those of Paul.” (138)

That’s the exact same point Earl Doherty makes in his book which Ehrman obviously didn’t bother reading. The silence is not just in Paul but in all the early epistles, proving that the idea of historical first century Jesus is late.

“They do not show that these authors did not know about the historical Jesus, because they clearly did.” (139)

Oh. Well, no needed for any evidence to that effect, then.

“One, obviously, is that Paul didn’t say more about the historical Jesus because he didn’t know much more. This strikes many readers as implausible: if he worshipped Jesus as Lord, surely he wanted to know more about him. Wouldn’t he want to know absolutely everything about him? It may seem so. But it is important to remember that when Christians today think of their faith, they often think about the ultimate source of their faith in the New Testament, which begins with the Gospels that describe the things Jesus said and did. And so for Christians today, it only makes sense that a Christian is informed about Jesus’s life. But when Paul was writing there were no Gospels. They were written later. It is not clear how important the details of Jesus’s life were to Paul.” (139)

First off, the epistles are first spoken about as being canonized by Marcion in the second century, so despite their nearly universal dating to the first century (largely assumed because of the epistles’ low Christology), we do not actually know for sure that there were no gospels at the time. But Paul would hardly need the gospels to know about the life of Jesus. Second, if Jesus had only lived 20 years prior, there should have been plenty of information about him from James or Peter or “acknowledged leaders,” yet as we’ve seen in Galatians, what they said “makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality” (2:6).

“And Paul could scarcely have thought that Jesus died if he hadn’t lived.” (140)

Oh, right. Mythicists must have just forgotten about that one. I guess that means Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, etc. must have been historical people too.

To be continued….